I have been productive, and I don't like PowerPoint.

It's official! My Dickens and Carlyle section is done! I'm pretty pleased with it. I'm sure it will change once my advisor gets a hold of it, but I think it's a solid start, and I definitely worked hard on it. As it turns out, my thesis seems to be transforming into a study of rhetoric, and how machines were used not only for their relevance to society, but because the language and metaphor that they engendered enabled authors to express themselves and their political views. They can symbolize coldness, inhumanity, consumption, industry, and all the Marxist horrors we first think of, but since they also can be, or at least seem alive, they can symbolize animation and galvanism. They are, in a word, malleable, which is what makes them such an appealing rhetorical tool.

Anyway, that's at least what this 4000 words was about. Who knows where the Frankenstein/Bleak House section will take me, but hopefully it will be somewhere useful. My goal is to read the entirety of Bleak House this weekend, and then I can reread Frankenstein before starting in on the nitty-gritty analytical stuff. I'm cutting it a little bit close, but the MA conference that I'm using this latter section for is more geared towards works in progress, so I'm less concerned about all my ideas being totally polished there than I am for the Arts conference.

Speaking of which, I am reacquainting myself with PowerPoint in an effort to make some headway into said Arts presentation. It's been...interesting. I've read in BoingBoing.net and a number of other places different attitudes towards PowerPoint, and I tend to come down on the Edward Tufte end of the spectrum--namely, I dislike it. However, Tufte's stance is that PowerPoint is Evil for reasons deriving from cognitive science and how PowerPoint basically turns your learning process into a shallow, depraved shadow of its former self. I've somewhat circumvented his concerns because I don't want my presentation to be entirely derived from the slide show--mostly it will hold the occasional photograph or direct quote from Dickens or Carlyle, and the real meat of the presentation will be what I have to say. But I tend to agree with Tufte nonetheless not from the cognitive science point of view, but simply because PowerPoint is cramping my style big time.

Trying to format and stylize in PowerPoint has so far been an exercise in frustration. Text doesn't format the way I want it to, because the program believes that the only text I would ever want would be in bullet form. It appears to struggle with the idea that I don't want my text in Arial font, ever, or use its suggested color scheme for a given background image. Or that I'd like to start with a blank slide, and add elements as I see fit, rather than having to decide off the bat that I want a photo on the left, text on the right, and a title. And what if I don't want a title? Well, that's just too bad, you'll have to delete that manually and then push everything else up so you don't have a glaring blank space at the top of the slide.

I get this same problem with all of the free website building things out there. This is partially due to my lack of know-how--I strongly suspect that there are functions on Wordpress and other places that would let me build what I want, or at least get closer to what I want. But ever since learning Dreamweaver, I really just want to upload my handcrafted html files rather than deal with all of the construction through templates within my browser. If I can find a way to do that without buying a domain name and storage space, then I could have a personal website up and running in two days, because it's not like I have a ton of stuff to put up there. I just want it to look and function the way I originally conceived it, and the services that are free tend to be the ones directed at people who want everything done for them with little regard for how and in what style.

This has actually caused me to rethink my position on my top-down, bottom-up discussion with my Dad. We've basically agreed that I'm a Mac user because I'm a top-down type of person--I don't really care what's going on under the hood, so long as the car runs to my specifications and doesn't misbehave. Dad is far more of a bottom-up type; he wants to know everything about what he's using and be able to configure from the nuts and bolts onwards. I still think I'm very much a top-down person for a lot of things, computers in particular. I have no interest in programming, and very little interest in configuration beyond what I can do by poking around in my Preferences window. However, when it comes to stylistic and artistic work, I am clearly a control freak.

Anyway, the point of this whole long rant is that PowerPoint is stifling my creativity, and I am frustrated with it. But I also want to have shiny things to keep people's attention while I talk at them for 20 minutes. I may just end up making lots of picture files and then running a manual slide show instead of using PowerPoint to show them. At least then things will look exactly how I want them to all the time. Bah!

Follow your spirit, and upon this charge...

I'm rewatching the new Sherlock Holmes movie and enjoying it possibly more thoroughly than I did the first time around. Mainly because I hadn't realized just how many references and direct quotations they took from Conan Doyle. The whole pocket watch analysis delivered by Watson was originally attributed to Holmes in The Sign of Four. A very nice reference while also establishing Watson as a seasoned collaborator. The boxing scene was also established in the same novel. The whole asskicking remix idea has far more basis in original canon than one would initially imagine. Ooh, ooh, and the whole knowing every street in London and being able to find exactly where he is despite being blindfolded in a carriage due to landmarks like potholes and bakery smells was also in the same novel! Maybe they just read the one. Well, either way, lovely!

It really is a shame so much scholarship has already been dedicated to Holmes. I would totally be on that. I may still be, if only in passing, for the Gothic tropes Doyle throws in there once in a while. The movie is rife with them, to be sure. Actually, the movie basically is a mashup of all of my favorite things about Victoriana. Industrialism! Science and the supernatural! 'Victoria Regina' engraved in a brocaded wall...with bullets! Top hats and monocles!

So you see, the title of this blog is not nearly so random as would otherwise be assumed.

And no, I'm not entirely procrastinating. Along with practicing for three hours (which felt a bit like slamming my head into a wall--Stravinsky refuses to stick) I did some cobbling together of notes and editing today that will ensure that tomorrow, I will be finishing the Hard Times/Past and Present portion of my dissertation, come hell or high water. Get excited! I kind of am myself. Mainly because things may actually be making sense to me now. There may be original contributions afoot!

Righto. Off to finish the movie. Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

...I am such an Anglophile.

Essay Madness and Picture Time!

Woo my essays are done!

I think they were fairly good as well. I hope. I always get a little delirious at the end of editing so that I can't always tell anymore, but I'm pretty sure they're good. Weirdly enough, the one on DeQuincey actually went more smoothly than the Sherlock Holmes one did, possibly because I knew that I had a lot more work to do on it. The Holmes one proved difficult just because it had been so nicely self-contained, that adding another book into the analysis was at times problematic. I may have stretched the reasoning in that one by the end a bit. Hopefully it was okay though. Anyway, handed them in yesterday, and then proceeded to sleep for forever. It was nice.

So now...massive dissertation work time. I've decided to do different sections for each conference, so basically I'm hoping to get 2/3 of the thing done in about three weeks, which is, you know, terrifying, but I think it's possible. They don't have to be absolutely polished by then, just there, so...yeah.

On the flip side, I just took about eight books back to the library, so the Book Stack of Doom is now just a pile again. Phew.

Also, my trip to Conwy and Chester was absolutely lovely! Erin and I weren't expecting to know anyone else on the trip, but as it happened an acquaintance of ours (who incidentally went to UMass Amherst for a year before transferring to McGill) was also there, so we hung out with her for a bit as well. I definitely want to go back to Wales--Conwy had a fabulous castle to wander about in, not too large, but ruinous in a picturesque way, and Chester had a gorgeous cathedral that I wandered about in for quite a while. The castle at Conwy was particularly cool because they managed to incorporate it rather seamlessly into a modern landscape--check it out:

Suspension bridge and castle all at once! It appeals to the anachronist in me.

We had a proper English afternoon tea in Conwy as well, complete with tiered presentation of sandwiches, scones, and Welsh sweetbread type things, which was delicious.

Chester was a bit more metropolitan, but still quite lovely, with lots of medieval-looking buildings and Roman ruins scattered about, including an amphitheater and garden, both of which we wandered into. I should add at this point that the weather was also glorious, which was definitely appreciated.

The cathedral was gorgeous, and quite atmospheric seeing as there was a choir rehearsal going on while we walked around. A lot of the stained glass had apparently been blown out, possibly during the war, which meant that there are a lot of unusual modern replacements, like this one:

And the cathedral proper is below.

Lovely, yes? Incidentally, I have to share one more picture that I just found totally awesome, because you'll never ever find it something like it in the US. There are various plaques for the dead of course all over the walls, but this one caught my eye.

It may be a bit too small to read, but the gist of it is that this guy was an American, but during the Revolution he supported Britain, and when the British withdrew from New York he dropped everything and went with them, and then probably became a known figure in the church, or something like that. Anyway, it entertained me, because we completely forget how one nation's turncoat is another's hero. Cool to see little random pieces of history around like that.

So anyway, great trip, I'll have to make another to maybe Cornwall or someplace else after conference madness is over. Ciao for now!

Bookstack of DOOM!

So, I am back in the swing of things! And by that, I mean I have an outrageous amount of work to do.

Observe:

This is my Stack of Doom (actually larger than shown, because of all the bought books on my other shelf) which should keep me occupied for the next week or so. To be fair, I think I've read six of them already. So it will probably be fine. I just need them for quotes and such. In any case, my two final essays are due a week from now, and the topics pretty cool, I think--one on the imagined Orient in DeQuincey and Coleridge, the other on strategies of detection and mapping, using H.G. Wells to critique Conan Doyle. Fun times!

I am, by the way, a huge fan of the black book in the middle: Out of Place by Ian Baucom. I'm finding I have very consistent taste in scholars--I like them eloquent, and all over the place in terms of source material. In this one, Baucom looks at cricket fields, Gothic architecture, linguistics, and a ton more in his effort of find places that define the diversity and hybridity of what Englishness has become because of its, and the world's, imperial history. I'm not very good at postcolonial theory, but it was an excellent read, made particularly fascinating by its multidisciplinarity.

In other news, I have submitted abstracts now for both my conferences, so that each is going to focus on a different section of my dissertation. So hopefully this will motivate me to get lots and lots done in the next few weeks (the conferences are on the 8th and 10th of June), so that I'll then be well set up to finish the rest by August and then rework and edit and nitpick to death until September. At least, that's the plan. We'll see how it goes. If I can actually make it work, then my god, I may have beaten my procrastination habit! If only temporarily.

Okay, having read the entirety of Carlyle's Past and Present this morning, I think I need a nap.

Edit: Also, I feel that I should note that it is now a quarter to nine o'clock at night, and the sun is only just beginning to set. Long summer days indeed! I could get used to this.