Life Decisions, Seminars, and Other General Mishaps

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone! Sorry I wasn't around family this year. I had seminar instead.

This semester has apparently gone by obscenely fast--I had my last Research Methods lecture last Monday, and it managed to send everyone into a complete panic. The focus of the lecture was basically a PhD information session, which I apparently have to think about now. There are deadlines for scholarships in January, along with some for PhD programs, so I have to start consulting people about my thesis proposal. Consider that my agenda for the coming week, since my reading load is a bit light for now. I'd like to apply to Leeds again, since I like it here, but I'll be looking at some other places as well. More generally though, I think I'd like to stay in the UK. It's been a rather wonderful few months so far, and I'm getting the sense that a single year is just not enough time for me to live here. So in addition to planning where I'm going to be in a year or so, I'll be looking at jobs accordingly, and accommodation. To be honest, accommodation is a bit more pressing, because while I don't necessarily have to start my PhD in the fall, I definitely do need a place to live. Argh. These things are not sorting themselves well in my brain yet. I am trying, though. A real estate catalog got pushed through everyone's mailboxes the other day, so if I end up staying in Leeds that's at least one place to start.

What's up with this being a real person deal? I so do not feel old enough to be dealing with apartment hunting and year-ahead planning.

Other news: I met with my Brontës professor about my essay, which basically confirmed the written feedback I'd gotten from her earlier. It was gratifying to hear that my writing style is up to the task of addressing all the complex ideas I want to convey, and we were in agreement over what needed to be changed and fleshed out. With twice as much space to work with this time around (the unassessed essay was limited to 2,000 words, the assessed version can be 4,000), I feel fairly confident that I can do the work required. Also, I apparently was channeling Edward Said through the whole thing, though on a less colonialist scale. So he'll be making an appearance in the next draft.

Additionally, I managed to do a presentation for this same seminar last Thursday, which went quite well considering I had to present about the Brontë's poetry, and I am terrible at poetry. Thank God for helpful critical articles. It's quite funny--I feel like the Brontës are often generally lumped together as one singular writing force, but when one reads not only their novels, but particularly their poetry, it's clear that this isn't the case at all. Branwell's the obvious outsider, seeing as he was male, a dissipated alcoholic, and never actually wrote a published novel. But more than that, he's adamantly Byronic, whereas his sisters took Byronic forms and then twisted and reformed them, often to a less Romantic aesthetic. Wordsworth made an appearance in their pieces, too. Emily is by far the most skilled poet, not afraid to embrace simplicity while Charlotte tended to overwork her verse. Meanwhile Anne was surprisingly compelling, but remained the most straightforwardly religious of the siblings. It seems to me that the only similarities that show are ones born of a shared upbringing; the rest is all quite different. That's not what I actually wrote about in my presentation--instead, I talked about functions of recollection versus remembrance and had a bizarre nervous attack while reading it to the class which was clearly stage fright not over my presenting to the class but presenting my writing to the class, and which turned out to be a completely unfounded anxiety as everyone really liked my writing style. Again. So nice to hear that even when I am not sure whether I'm making sense, I can at least get my intended points across fairly clearly and elegantly!

Finally, and on a much lighter note, der ist ein Weihnachtsmarkt at the Millennium Centre in Leeds! In other words, a German Christmas Market. Apparently they're very common in England as well as Germany, stemming from German immigrants bringing their traditions over a couple of centuries ago, or something like that. In any case, there's a large complex of stall shops set up in the plaza, selling crafts and gifts and German food and mulled wine, and it's all quite charming. Well, apart from the giant beer tent in the middle of it, topped with giant statues of ponies and men hauling barrels of ale. That's less charming, and more hilarious, but I suppose this is to be expected given, you know, it's a German market. In conclusion, I got all of my Christmas shopping done. Win!

This entry is overblown and overlong. I suppose that's what I get for not updating for over a week.

Dissertation: Consider yourself proposed.

Right! The proposal has been emailed. I feel pretty good about it, especially since my annotated bibliography is shaping up rather nicely with between eleven and thirteen sources from which to start from. I talked to some of the other students in my Bronte seminar today, and people seemed to like the sound of my topic as well, which was definitely good to hear. So now it's legit: I'm writing about machinery and the Gothic. It couldn't be more like me if I tried. I feel good about it too, better than I did about Middlemarch last year, which in retrospect was mostly me trying too hard. This topic feels less forced, more aligned with my interests and my mind.

I've begun getting lunch with some of the girls from the Bronte seminar after our class, which has been quite nice. One of them works for the English department in administration as well, so we get faculty gossip, which is very entertaining. It's a nice cap to the afternoon, and I think we're probably going to try to absorb the whole class into it some time or another.

We also got our unassessed essays back, and to my relief the reception of mine was fairly positive. My professor's main critique was a request for greater specificity, which is exactly what I wanted to do with it but didn't have sufficient room for this time around, so I think that's a good sign. Overall, she said she liked my prose style and thought it conveyed my ideas well, and pointed out some places where I needed to clarify my points. So all in all, feedback that I can definitely work with.

The only thing I'm really not looking forward to will be switching citation schemes--MLA is popular in the States, but not over here, and since I was never really taught MLA properly in the first place and as a consequence developed some bad habits about it, I'm just scrapping it completely and starting over with MHRA style, hopefully done properly. I can already tell that it is going to drive me nuts, but it's an improvement over getting accused of plagiarism or something. Also, I hear that Harvard system is way more annoying, so I'm avoiding it.

Other small and/or random observations:
-Taps here are extremely finicky. It takes a while to actually get steady water pressure in most sinks, and cold water takes a while to appear, which is totally backwards from what I'm used to.
-I'm pretty sure wellies are used even less here than in the States despite there being more rain. Maybe it's just because I'm in a city, but I think since the rain tends to come and go more often but also more quickly, people don't bother and just carry umbrellas all the time instead. Luckily, with my giant purse I can do the same.
-It is 4:00 PM and the sun has set. It is taking me a while to get used to this.
-The Dewey Decimal System is not in effect! I don't even know what library organization style is used here, but it's definitely different. I honestly don't have a preference, but it was a little odd at first.
-Of all the little cultural differences floating around, I am having the hardest time getting over how the first floor is not the ground floor. Don't know why, that's just the one thing I can't reconcile my brain with.
-I've started watching a BBC drama called 'Garrow's Law' which has just begun broadcasting. It's concerned with William Garrow, who apparently had a large hand in reforming the justice system in the 18th century by actually giving a proper defense to the prosecuted and addressing the jury directly. Pretty enjoyable so far.

Okay, I think that's it. I have to give a presentation on Bronte poetry for next week, so that's the project for this coming weekend.

Artistic Distraction!

So, I am apparently back into the swing of things--reading week is over, and classes have returned. We had some good discussion on Daniel Deronda yesterday, and now I'm reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for tomorrow. It's a vast improvement over Agnes Grey in terms of actually entertaining me, but it's also much longer. But that's okay--substance is good!

I also declare my thesis topic tomorrow, which will be tons of fun--I have to reduce my explanation to 50 words, so we'll see how that goes. I'm also accumulating an ever growing stack of books from which to research, as well as lots of online articles that I need to read, which is somewhat overwhelming but mostly reassuring that I'm not just pulling ideas out of thin air.

On a side note, I have discovered that not only is the Middle Eastern grocery much much closer to my house than the big supermarket, but it is also much cheaper, and carries most of the basic things I need for every day meals. It's a hole the wall, but they sell two litres of milk for a pound, and various fruits and vegetables of enormous size, which is basically excellent. I'll be going there as much as possible.

Also, I'm finally getting in some practice time! Georgia arranged it so that I can call her in the morning on the day I want to practice, and she signs me up for a room and lets me into the building. It's sort of a pain for her, but since the music department isn't willing to give me a passcode or key fob or something to get in, we don't really have too many options. It does, however, have the distinct advantage for me of actually making me deliberately take the time to practice, and then use the time wisely. I generally do two hour sessions now, and its quite nice--in addition to a Rachmaninov etude, I'm trying to resuscitate Ravel's Sonatine, which I think I learned when I was 14? 15? Anyway, I'm actually up to the technical challenges this time around, and I like it a lot, so it'll be nice to have in my working repertoire. Vassar sort of spoiled me with all of their lovely Steinways, but the facilities here are fine. The building itself is rather labyrinthine, so I'm glad I have Georgia leading me about.

And finally, I got bored last night, so I did some random steampunk photoshopping. The result? New desktop wallpaper!
Basically made entirely from pictures of pocketwatches and Victorian stock graphics. Fun times!

No seriously, I do work here.

Nothing's happened. I am just compelled to entertain.

It's reading week! And I am reading. Mostly articles for my dissertation--and you know, I'm not actually finding all that much about my topic. At least, not in any specific capacity. Do you know what this means? It means I've found a niche! An unexplored niche! SO. EXCITED. This also means, however, that finding 10-12 sources for my bibliography may be a bit of a challenge. But it's okay! Excited anyway.

Also I just need to get it out there that I got sidetracked into reading a critique of Frederic Jameson, which was rather interesting until the critic decided to noun-ify the word "problematic", and now I cannot take anything else he says seriously. Noun-ifying adjectives is all very well and good when in the service of comical neologisms and/or Calvin and Hobbes, and I can sort of sense that there may be a precedent for it in this particular case, but I do not like when the resulting sentence sounds like the author just forgot a word at the end and slapped a period on anyway. It's stupid, and could easily be avoided. Is "problem" too simple a word? Maybe I should be relieved he didn't go for the even more superfluous "problematical". Grrr.

Can you tell that I had really strong coffee this morning? Because I did. I'm bad at measuring precisely how much instant needs to be put in the mug. Thus, I sort of overdid it. And now want to do about twelve things at once. Thus, the blogging in addition to looking for sources online and in the library catalogue. I'll go over there once I've accumulated a list of stuff to pick up, and then I'm going to Marta's to help her edit an essay and then grab some dinner. Productivity all around!

This was a totally pointless entry. I'm posting it anyway because people should share in my overcaffeinated madness. Also, the whole noun-ifying incident needed to be expressed, and I don't think my flatmates would appreciate me yelling about grammar. So yeah. I'll go back to work now.

Woo I'm twenty-two...

...and it was Guy Fawkes day here in the north of England, which made it rather more fun than usual. The first half of yesterday was all work, however--I finished my first essay for my Bronte seminar, which was a flurry of research. Speaking of which, I love JSTOR. Finding journal articles and reviews online has never been so easy. I've also been told to check out Google Scholar, so I'll have to do that sometime soon. Anyway, the actual content after finding sources was good fun, because I was analyzing Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which was her second attempt at writing the story of an English narrator who goes to teach in a foreign land. The first attempt was The Professor, which she didn't expect to publish, and thus was only released after her death. It was interesting on an intellectual level for the ideas she wanted to present on the dynamics of student-teacher relationships, on foreignness, and on her narrator's strategic reticence, but it wasn't very smoothly written, and the narrator was not very likeable at all.

Villette vastly improves on its first iteration, but still carries over the main themes that Charlotte wanted to address, so I looked at how the narrator's reticence actually facilitates her study of foreignness. The narrator, Lucy Snowe, presents as almost a nonentity to begin with, but she slowly inhabits herself as an actual personality by defining what she isn't--namely, French and Catholic. The reader constructs who she is by drawing around her all of her observations of foreignness, thereby finding her through her negative image, so to speak. I was able to address the idea on a number of different levels, all of which need some fleshing out still, but seeing as this was an unassessed essay and therefore a sort of rough draft for the real one at the end of the semester (plus it was limited to 2000 words), I think I hit my main points enough for now, but will go into them more deeply in the future.

So yes, all of this was done Wednesday night, but then I had to finish up some reading the morning before seminar, so all in all, until the afternoon I was all productivity. After that, though, not so much! I went over to Erin and Marta's in the evening, and we went to the bonfire at the park, which had to be at least fifty feet high, and laced with firework sparklers. There were tons of people milling around, along with concession stands, and some guy from the city council gave a introduction. A half hour in, they started a real firework show, which was quite elaborate and well planned. So all in all, quite fun. The fireworks continued all around the city until midnight, so I got to see some distant sparks (along with hear various explosions) from my window after getting home. Definitely a most bombastic birthday!

And now, I'll be resting up this weekend and then plunging into reading week, which is meant for undergrads because they have exams or something coming up, but means that I don't have class all of next week, so I'll be using the time to talk to professors about my dissertation topic, and trying to get a head start on some massive readings I have for my seminars. I'll be reading Daniel Deronda for one, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for another, and lots and lots of essays, both for classes and for my annotated bibliography, due at the end of the month. The bibliography is meant for my dissertation, which is great as a way of finding tons of sources early on in the process, but it is due for my Research Methods lecture in a formal capacity, which is a bit less exciting. So yeah, lots of work coming up. We'll see how it goes!

Thanksgiving!

Weekend success! We just had our international Thanksgiving celebration at Erin's flat yesterday, which was quite fun, and actually worked in terms of food and getting everyone together. Behold!

It was quite international both in the compromised date between Canadian and American Thanksgiving, but also the cuisine--apple pie, chicken and mashed potatoes were served with a Japanese stew and Yorkshire pudding. It was delicious, and I was very relieved that I hadn't eaten breakfast that morning. Everyone contributed something, so it was an honest team effort. This week is shaping up to be quite festive as well, seeing as Bonfire Night is celebrated Thursday, so we're all going out to Hyde Park to watch the fireworks. For serious: Best. Birthday. Ever.

I also turned in my first assignment today: a critical review of an article of my choosing. It was quite brief, only 700 words, but a good exercise, and useful because I picked an article I can use for my dissertation. It analyzed the Gothic elements of Dickens' Bleak House to prove that Dickens was repurposing the Gothic as a way of raising social issues, rather than just sensationalizing. The paper was well researched, so it will definitely be useful in the future. Now, onto my Bronte essay, due Thursday, and I declare my dissertation topic on the 16th. Things are picking up!