A Monstrous Conference!

Or rather, a conference about monstrosity.

It went really splendidly, I am pleased to say! Didn't exactly have an auspicious beginning, but it ended up being both a fun and engaging experience.

I got to Leicester around noon after having a frankly dysfunctional morning--the night before, I discovered mold growing in my bedroom and had a hypochondriac freakout about how I was going to inhale spores and die, and so I slept for a scant few hours on my floor away from the wall in question before catching an early morning train. Additionally, getting to Leicester required switching not only trains, but also stations, which meant that I had to almost-run from one part of Newark to another (yes, there is a Newark here) with my luggage because my first train was running a half hour late. It was not great to do that on two hours' sleep.

But in any case, I made the second train, and got to my hotel to drop off myself without too much difficulty; my map-reading skills have apparently improved. I had a slightly harder time finding the DeMontfort campus, but still found it in good time to see the beginning of the conference.

The conference itself was quite interesting, with a good blend of papers and approaches to themes of monstrosity and their implications for literature and culture. We covered everything from American Psycho to Lovecraft to pamphlets of the English Civil Wars, and I particularly liked how different time periods were blended together in discussion such that the central themes of what made a monster and what undermined them always came through strongly, no matter what the context. There was also an openness about letting classic canonical literature reside easily with pop culture that I really liked.

My paper on Saturday seemed to go over quite well also, though as usual I had some esprit d'escalier moments over the questions I got asked. The keynote speakers were both fascinating, and had hilariously opposed ideas about humanism/universalism vs. cultural subjectivity, which played out in lively debate and spilled over into the conference dinner. I also met some great people from all over the world, and talked about everything from steampunk to the horror of Twilight over some really delicious food. So on the whole, it was a very successful weekend.

I'm going to do a more academic write-up of the conference on my reading group's website, so when that goes up, I'll post a link to it as well.


EDIT: The write-up is now online; you can find it here.

Ta for now!

Caaaake

Went out for dinner and drinks with the flatmates the other night for a belated birthday celebration, wherein I sampled a couple of extremely delicious cocktails and gorged myself on some excellent Thai fried rice. It was served in half a pineapple! Delicious!

And also, because she is awesome and also an extremely skilled baker, Barbara made me a cake!

RAINBOW CAKE. It contains so much sugar it's ridiculous. The icing is like flavored crack. But I've had to be up early three days in a row due to a plethora of choir rehearsals, and tomorrow I am editing my paper, emailing lots of people, singing a service at the cathedral with lots of small children, and then making my power point presentation. So I am all about temporarily upping my sugar intake. Cake for breakfast, woohoo!

See, I'm totally not a real person yet.

Things that have happened

Good god, I'm twenty-four now. I'm supposed to be all adult and stuff. What??

I am fighting this by watching How To Train Your Dragon and buying comic books. Yes.

Anyway.

I have finished my conference paper! Or at least a draft of it. I'm going to fix it again next week before I have to present it officially, but so far the people who have read it have enjoyed it, which I'm very pleased about. I'm relieved to have the bulk of it done so that I can go back to concentrating on my thesis, which I haven't done for about a month, oops. In the meantime, I will endure the annoying restrictions of powerpoint and get that done as soon as possible, and then read it all aloud a lot so I don't stutter and let my voice drop down into the bowels of my stressed-out register.

I taught my first tutorial last week, which went fairly well--I have a really excellent group, in that they're all willing to participate but no one person completely dominates discussion. I quite lost track of time, so we talked quite a lot about Robinson Crusoe and not a lot at all about Mansfield Park, but on the whole we covered the main themes that needed to be touched on. I know I need a lot more practice in terms of getting comfortable enough to really listen and use students' points as jumping off points for continuing discussion, but hopefully that will come with repetition and ever more note-taking and study. It was definitely enjoyable though; I must admit I do enjoy teaching on the whole.

I've also been enjoying choir immensely for its fast pace and large repertoire, and the fact that we're going to Rome in the spring to do a tour, which is extremely cool. I've also had the first of a few singing lessons and the instructor has said that I have a few more notes in my upper range if I work at it, which is kind of exciting. It would be nice to have a proper handle on my upper register rather than having to strain to reach notes. We're doing a couple more performances in the cathedral as well, which will never not be awesome.

I've also joined a reading group based in Newcastle that is being organized in part by a friend of mine from Leeds: www.northeast19century.org
We had our first meeting last week and it was very enjoyable, and I'm now in charge of making posters for it, which is good fun. I think it will be a really nice way of getting back into a semi-seminar environment with other postgrads, and having some fun reading literature that isn't necessarily revolving around my specific research. For Halloween we read ghost stories, and next week we're talking about the Brontës and the Lake District Poets.

The days have gotten abominably short again, which never fails to be both depressing and incredibly confusing since I no longer have any sense of when evening is, since the sun sets several hours before any definition of evening begins. It isn't particularly cold yet, though, of which I'm glad. This time, however, I'm prepared! I have fingerless gloves, a hot water bottle, and two extra blankets on my bed. I'm going to look like some sort of bundled urchin, but I am going to be warm all winter. I am determined.

Also, I'm pretty sure that anyone who reads this already knows, but my parents has acquired KITTIES. Eeeeeeeeeee! After a very long debate, they are henceforth named Gwen and Cecily, or alternately Moose and Squirrel, and I cannot wait to go home to meet them. There will be a lot of cooing and squeals of delight involved. Because this is exactly me:

http://xkcd.com/

So yeah. It's gonna be awesome. Either that, or my parents are going to throw me out of the house for being obnoxiously twee.

Oh, and also...

For some reason my department has collectively decided that my name is Katie, and so now that's how I'm listed on DUO, the central online resource of the university.

Cute. Someone must have just made a typo or something.

OH WAIT, NO, IT IS NOT CUTE THAT'S NOT MY NAME HOW DID THIS HAPPEN.

A lot of singing, and a very boring desert island.

I had a pretty awesome though exhausting Sunday, which began and ended with choir, and was filled in the middle with cramming as much knowledge about Robinson Crusoe into my brain as possible so that I don't make a complete fool of myself in front of my students.

I accidentally forced myself into getting a fair amount of cardio because part of the way over to St. Chad's at nine in the morning I realized that I had forgotten my robes and had to go back and this was on a day when our director particularly wanted us all to be on time because another choir was visiting to sing with us. So I ran (in a skirt and heels, mind you) back to the house and then back into town and just managed to slide in before the proverbial bell, but was a damp mess due to both sweat and the light rain. But then the rehearsal and service were fine, and the visiting choir were very nice, and afterwards there were eclairs. Tea and cake, I'm telling you!

After window shopping in town with a couple of other choir people, I then parked myself in the library for the entirety of the afternoon to read nearly the entirety of Robinson Crusoe, because I have to teach it in the beginning of November, and promised to email guiding questions to my students by this Tuesday. Man, I'm sorry, I know I'm an English student, but this book is boring. Incredibly important, and often quite interesting from a developmental standpoint, but boring. There is a reason I have avoided most of the first half of the 18th century. I adored, on the other hand, the essay on it by Virginia Woolf. Here's an excerpt:

It is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective. For this reason he thwarts us and flouts us at every turn...Before we open the book we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we expect it to give us. We read, and we are rudely contradicted on every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. (From The Second Common Reader, copyright, 1932, by Harcourt & Company and renewed 1960,  by Leonard Woolf, pp. 50-58.)

It's a brilliant essay, and accurately describes, I think, the average modern reader's reaction (it certainly did mine). The novel is very much an experiment in narrative, and while occasionally exciting--there are battles and wild animals and of course, a lot of shipwrecks--it is also told from the point of view of the lowest common denominator of what makes a sensible man. There is, as another critic pointed out, nothing to make Crusoe at all distinguishable from anyone else--he has a certain amount of intelligence and resourcefulness, but no particular taste or preference for anything beyond what is most useful to him, and his emotions are more akin to physical ailments than feelings.

And yet at the time of its publishing, it was galvanizing because it was fiction, but it achieved verisimilitude. It was not a true story, but the sheer fact of Crusoe's (and Defoe's) unimpressed, undramatic style of narrative made it ring more truthfully than was expected of a fictional tale. One would not expect Crusoe to lie or to exaggerate, because he, as a character, lacked the personality or creativity to do so. It's a strange but fascinating trick, and one which his contemporaries were enthralled by.

I was not enthralled, though I was interested from the historical point of view. Which I suppose is enough to be going on with. I have definitely enjoyed looking at the critical articles around it--getting the Norton edition was a good choice.

Getting back to Sunday, I emerged from the library ravenous roughly six hours later and wolfed down a sandwich before heading over to the cathedral, where we did another small performance which was mostly interesting not because of what we were doing, but what was going on around us: It was sort of like an open house for the university's Christian Council, so there was a massive candlelight procession up from the center of town into the cathedral, which we watched as we sat in the stalls with all of the lights off listening to booming organ music and looking around at just how creepy and cool the spires and carvings were by moonlight. Then someone gave the processors a tour of the cathedral by lighting up different parts of it in isolation to describe what order it was all constructed in. Then finally they turned most of the lights on, and we sang some pieces in front of a thousand-odd people who were all milling around and taking pictures and gawping. It was bizarre.

After that I got home around ten and pretty much collapsed into bed for the evening.

But yeah, singing in the cathedral is badass. I'll definitely be looking forward to doing it again. And in the meantime I have to get back into the rhythm of literary analysis, because I am clearly rusty after having spent all of my days doing historiography and stuff. Good times!

Word spew life update!

Oh dear, it has been AGES since I've posted last, so this will be a scattershot of news, in order of whatever I can remember first:

SCOTLAND! Scotland was wonderful--had a great time with el parentes, wandering about in random cities and seeing castles and taking absurd numbers of pictures of ruins and then going up to the Isle of Skye, which is kind of like stepping back in time by a few centuries in terms of how the landscape feels. I kind of get why Tolkien's conception of Middle Earth was so epic with landscape like that to inspire him. So yes, there was much wandering, an eensey bit of mountain climbing, and lots of tea and beer and fish and chips. Definitely a much needed break from work.

Check out this landscape:

Pretty sweet, I'd say.

Since I've been back, I've attended three teacher training sessions of varying degrees of helpfulness that have mostly gotten me acquainted with how to grade fairly and facilitate discussion. I feel prepared for my preliminary meeting with my students, which is happening on Tuesday, and then depending on what texts they say they want to focus on for the proper tutorials, I'll have more or less material to prep and read up on. Hopefully they will like the same books that I do!

I have also joined the chapel choir of St. Chad's college (I know, I had no idea that there's a saint named Chad either--I feel like he'd wear popped-collar polo shirts and terrible plaid shorts), because I missed singing and also having a sense of when weeks start and end, and the time commitment will definitely go a long way towards putting me on a more consistent work schedule. I managed to land a place as a Choral Scholar, which means that I learn the music independently outside of rehearsals, do a few more services, and get paid for the privilege, which is pretty cool. The ensemble sounds quite good, and the scholars especially are a nice tight group of voices, which is exciting. I've managed to not get struck by lightning for my heathen ways yet either, so that's good. Instead of fire and brimstone, the Anglican church tends to be more about tea and cake, which I can get behind.

On the other hand, altos are woefully outnumbered, which I'm really not used to, and as a result I've had to step up my game a bit in terms of supporting the section. I'm one of seven altos in the choir against maybe twenty sopranos, and two against three among the scholars. So on the whole, it's best if I don't screw up very often. On the other hand, though, everyone's really nice, and apparently Chad's has a way of adopting lots of people because it's generally considered the college for all of the nice people. Also, we get to sing in the cathedral several times, which is ace.

In other news, my semi-new flatmates have settled in well, it seems. Verity's very nice, and I already have an invitation from her and her mom to come and visit them in the Lake District; and I can geek out with Tom about comic book movies and other silliness, which I appreciate.

As is usual during term, time seems to be going by at a rather fast clip, so I've been out of the house quite a lot trying to juggle my newly busy schedule and research. I have a meeting with my teaching mentor tomorrow, which I think will mostly just be me poking my head into his office and saying 'hi', since I won't have done any teaching yet. His name is also Simon, so I can see this getting confusing fast.

I'm nearly finished with my conference paper, which I'll then send out to everyone I can think of to take a look at it before I start working on the powerpoint to go along with it. After that, I'm going to try and crank out at least a part of my Faust and Frankenstein chapter. I got an email from Simon saying that I was in good shape and could slow down a bit in term of sheer material production, so if I can get that one chapter done over Michaelmas and Epiphany terms, and then begin another one during Easter, I'll still be on schedule to finish the whole thing on time. I kind of want to get this chapter done as quickly as possible so that I can start looking at the really fun stuff--mainly, Marxist historians, and then maybe some films? Or maybe 20th century literature? Too many possibilities! But I think that that's where it'll feel more like I'm exploring new territory, rather than reinterpreting heavily-trodden ground. I'm determined to at least touch on steampunk somewhere in here, though I'm not sure where yet. But it's definitely relevant and important, so I'll find a way.

I think that's all there is for now--I have to speed my way through all of the books on the syllabus for my course so that I actually know what I'm talking about, and then I have at least two or three books on the queue for fun reading, although they're maybe not exactly what one would term light: I've been meaning to read Generation Kill for ages, and finally got a hold of a used copy, and I've dipped a toe into Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, which reminds me a lot of The Lives of Others despite the differing time periods, in terms of the sort of pervading fear and somewhat detached but still very affecting storytelling. So, lots of good things literature-wise too look forward to.

And finally, I have booked my tickets home for the holidays, so I am now guaranteed a proper Christmas this year, which I am very excited about. Until then, however, I shall be very busy indeed.

Why do I do this to myself.

Check list of my life right now:

1. Finish editing intro chapter.
2. Finish editing Marx chapter.
3. Write and hand in my Annual Review, in which I attempt to convince my department that I haven't been wasting my time.
4. Re-read Marx chapter.
5. Decide the last section of said Marx chapter is completely irrelevant.
6. Scrap section entirely. Panic.
7. Decide that I simply don't have time to fix it right now, even though I know exactly how to, because it will involve lots of research I haven't done yet because it's material I wasn't planning on covering until my third year. Oops. 
8. Cope by writing a cover letter and applying for a second teaching position.
9. Panic again.
10. Fill out forms, and then go to meet people in finance so I can get paid for teaching.
11. Apply for conference funding.
12. Finish editing Carlyle chapter.
13. Celebrate! 
14. Hand everything in with profuse apologies to my advisor, including a) how long this has all taken, and b) how I am scrapping that section in the Marx chapter even though it's all shiny and new while c) promising that I'm going to totally fix that as soon as I'm back from vacation, really.
15. Photoshop therapy all weekend. Plus a manicure. And maybe a massage.
16. VACATION. COME HERE, I NEED YOU.

So far I'm on step 9. Yeah. Although the panic is probably being exacerbated by the three million cups of tea I had this morning.

Stupid step 7. I totally did come up with an awesome way of fixing my Marx chapter today, except that it requires analyzing two texts that are each 400 pages long and then lots of articles about them. Oh brain, why so slow to realize these things? We could have fixed it if you came up with this solution two weeks ago! As it is, that will be the next step in this madness, after I come back from Scotland. 

I suppose it's good that at least I have a next step. Still, I so wanted to be done with these chapters, but now they're just going to haunt me until Christmas or something. Bah.

Employment!

I have been offered a teaching placement for the year, hooray!

I'll be teaching a module of Introduction to the Novel, which is what I had hoped to get. I am very excited, and very nervous. And feeling slightly underqualified for my life, but that's okay, I'll get over it.

So.

I'm being entrusted with undergrads!

...Oh god.

Another post of procrastination, ack.

I have not updated in ages. And since I'm freaking out over all of the editing I still have to do because my work ethic has been horrendous these past few weeks, I'm going to use this as a coping mechanism. Huzzah, or something!

The summer has been relatively boring, although I've managed to see a lot of movies, and as a result I'm now really excited for The Avengers to come out next year.

I also went on an excursion out to Alnwick Castle, which was extremely beautiful, but it was far too rainy to stay for the gardens, so I'll have to go again some time. The building itself though was Parisian in its opulence, which was rather unexpected in a random Northumbrian estate, but very impressive nonetheless. Apparently the same family has kept it for something like 700 years, which is an awesome track record, honestly. And on a far more silly note, they also had an extra area designated for children and there was a giant dragon there, which obviously I had to fight:

Punching out dragons. Like you do.

As you can tell, I am totally a mature adult.

The rest of the month has been spent trying to edit, which has been sort of like pulling teeth because as usual I get distracted by big ideas and big possibilities when really I just need to suck it up and read more primary sources and then actually use them to expand and alter all of my arguments. Then again, though, I've been dipping my toes into the visual culture aspect of the Industrial Revolution, and as a result, I found this (edited to be linked instead of posted for language), which I really, really want to include in my thesis. It's totally relevant. I can make an awesome argument to include it. Also it makes me laugh.

And this is why I never get anything done.

Paris!

I am procrastinating over my thesis. Thus, a blog post.

Paris was lovely, as could only be expected. It was wonderful to see family as well! We had a fabulous time trundling around the city, and I was very happy to follow the lead of those who actually knew Paris and its windy ways. 

Notre Dame! And lots and lots of people.

Highlights were definitely wandering around Notre Dame, despite the touristy-ness, the Musée D'Orsay (the Manet exhibit is spectacular), and an absolutely amazing restaurant we went to on the first night I was there, which served French/everything else fusion food of a sort I have never encountered before. The combinations of flavors were so odd on paper, but SO GOOD IN APPLICATION. It was pretty fantastic.

Also later I tried escargot, because...well, because. It mostly tasted like butter and garlic, which I am a-okay with. I also generally gorged myself on bread and cheese and chorizo. 

The city is filled with motorcycles instead of Vespas now, it seems. It makes me want to learn how to ride bikes and be a badass. I am probably not cool enough to follow through with this, however. 

I got to see almost the entirety of the Louvre as well, due to having an entire extra day to myself before my flight. Which meant I got to hang out in Napoleon's apartments, and lust after his furniture.

Not the gold stuff, though. Because seriously, it was like the Doges Palace only French, and that is ridiculous. But look at this! I want this:

Sphinx embellishments! Contrasting wood tones! Black accent stripes! I want them. There's a matching settee too. Furniture shopping with dead emperors, that's how I roll.

This post is aptly demonstrating how I have completely lost all coherence due to a massive head cold that struck me down as soon as I returned to England. Gah. 

I'll just see myself out. And maybe buy some nyquil and tissues.

AT LONG LAST.

My visa has finally been approved and sent back to me. Or rather, to the immigration people at the university. Until it is physically in my possession, I will not be entirely convinced. But still. Ability to come and go freely from England without being deported, hooray!

London!

I return from a well-deserved vacation in London! Previous to this, I had just turned in my first semi-officially-assessed piece of work, the formulation of which made me I realize just how much editing I needed to do to make all of my previous work at all presentable/relevant. Thus, I needed to run away to a different city for a while. Luckily, I had purchased those fantastic tickets for 'Much Ado...", and thus, away Maggie and I went.

We arrived around noon on Wednesday, and went to the Museum of London, which presented archaeological archives from prehistory to the present from London, with artifacts from everywhen, Bronze Age to punk culture in the 80s, and was a ton of fun. I may have tried on a medieval jerkin.

Pure class.

We then met with Maggie's friend Sarah and her parents for the evening, since Sarah was graduating from an MA program in UCL. We all ended up at a cabaret bar...in which I ended up singing with the main performer. No, seriously:

This is me, in a desperate panic.

Less awesome was the fact that I promptly forgot almost all of the lyrics to the song, even though I sing it all the time, so it was sort of ridiculous and terrible, but I stumbled through clinging to the last shreds of my dignity, and no one booed, so I guess it wasn't too horrific. Anyway, it was very random, but fun. And clearly I need to remember how to actually sing in public, because it was rather embarrassing to experience complete brain freeze in the middle of a bar. Yes. I was assured by Sarah's parents that should I ever fail out of my PhD, I could be a lounge singer, but they may have been being kind? Anyway.

On Thursday we watched the changing of the guard in the morning, and then went to the museums of natural history and of science, which were very fun. The science one in particular had tons of industrial age machinery which I geeked out over, including Babbage's difference engines! I took videos of some of their workings.

Also:

Obligatory goofy pose with Darwin!

On Friday we went to the British Museum, in which we gawked over mummies and I spazzed over their exhibit of clockwork (seriously, at least half of my pictures aren't of London, they're of clocks), and I bought a giant antique map poster that is too big for my room, but I don't care, it's getting hung anyway.

Then we moseyed over to the John Soane house, which has been kept preserved as per Soane's orders since his death in the 1700s. It was a really lovely place, and very interesting in both exhibits and structure, since Soane himself was an architect who collected tons of stuff from antiquity, as well as paintings by Hogarth and other rarities, and designed his house to best display them. Some of the windows he built to channel light were truly ingenious, particularly down in the basement, which he wanted to feel like an Egyptian tomb, or somesuch.

And then after having some fantastic Lebanese food, we finally saw 'Much Ado About Nothing'! It was really fun--set in quasi-modern times, which somehow made the changes in mood much more exaggerated to me than in previous experience. The slapstick was hysterical, and all of the performances were very good, despite some occasional rough spots that will no doubt be smoothed out later in the run, and I definitely coveted some of Catherine Tate's dresses. And at one point David Tennant wore sparkles and fishnets. I don't even know. Anyway, it was very entertaining, and we had quite good seats despite West End prices, so it was altogether a very lovely evening.

On Saturday just before we left, I also made a quick jaunt around the British Library to see the Magna Carta and lots of awesome period sheet music. They had also just opened a pretty excellent exhibit on sci-fi that got me thinking in new and interesting directions for my thesis, or maybe just a bit of it. I'll keep you posted on that, if it comes to anything.

Overall, a very successful and packed trip. We returned with sore feet but lots of edification and good pictures.

Whitby: Abbey ruins are my favorite thing.

Doris's sister and her friend are visiting from Germany for the week, so Doris rented a car to take them around, and I happily tagged along for the ride when they went down to the coast at Whitby on a rather glorious day yesterday.

It seems that coastal towns all have the same general feel of boardwalks and artisan shops and random goth stores. It kind of felt like Cape Cod.

However, Cape Cod does not have fantastic ruins on cliffsides. I swear, I will never get tired of these half-crumbled churches and abbeys, they are just way too beautiful.

It was a fantastic day for picture-taking, as is probably apparent, and for the first time in what seems like aeons, I actually brought my own camera, so I had a lot of fun framing shots.

 

Then we wandered around town a bit--it was really crowded with families, since it's Easter vacation--and walked out along the harbor.

 

After that, we had lunch at a pub before climbing back up the 199 steps to the abbey (apparently the number is a big deal? It was on a sign post) and heading home. Spring is cooperating quite nicely so far!

Success!

My Carlyle chapter is done! 13,000 words, another 40 pages down, and I actually feel good about this one. It felt substantial and coherent, and not just the ramblings of someone who has done too much reading and not enough thinking. Hopefully my advisor will like it.

Also, it is Maggie's birthday on Friday, so we are doing celebration stuff both on the day and on Saturday as a way of blowing off some steam. Fun times in Newcastle, which will actually still have people in it, unlike Durham! This place is such a college town, it is absolutely desolate right now since all the students are on Easter break. It is very strange.

Okay, bed now! My brain is exhausted.

This is a post of procrastination.

If their radio silence is any indication (which according to the immigration people, it is), then the border agency has not even given my visa application to a caseworker yet. Their lack of efficiency is making me stabby.

I seriously should have just taken a six week vacation at home and done the damn thing from there. Le sigh. Swings and roundabouts.

Anyway.

Despite having a far better sense of what I'm doing with this chapter than I did before, I am completely avoiding finishing it in favor of doing laundry and vacuuming. And writing this post. Maybe if I write about the chapter, I will feel better about sitting down and actually doing it? Let's try that.

I think I've spent the last few months completely overthinking this whole project. As a result, my writing style has gone completely haywire, which is very frustrating since I used to think writing was one of my strengths. But I got caught up in writing lots of random research down without properly contextualizing it and everything became a mess, and so now I'm trying to sort it all out again. So far, it's going pretty well, in part because I'm going back into close analysis of specific texts, which is something I'm more comfortable with. On the other hand, at the moment I have the chapter split up like so:

1. Introduction
2. 'Signs of the Times' and diagnosing the Machine Age
3. Romantic Origins
4. Past and Present
5. Carlyle's influence on Dickens (shamelessly lifted from my MA dissertation)

Which is all well and good, but now I'm thinking that maybe 3 and 4, or 2 and 3 could be blended together into a discussion of origins and a primary text all at once, which might be clearer. I suspect I will have to print the whole 12,000+ words of the blasted thing out to tinker with it, traditional cut-and-paste style. I'm going to have to buy more printer credits.

To conclude, if I can actually make my brain actually behave itself, I'm going to try and sort this, so that I can finish the chapter by tomorrow, which will be really awesome.

In other news: I did not win anything at the northeast poster competition, which is a bit disappointing, but oh well. I still hung out with some cool people, and got a chance to print an edited version of my poster out on the university's dime, so meh. I got a complimentary pen for my efforts. I would have liked a hundred quid more, but what can you do.

Also interesting were the talks about public engagement that were included in the day's program, which got me thinking that I would like to get more involved in that aspect of academia. It's one that is meeting a lot of resistance in the upper echelons of universities, but it's importance is increasingly being recognized, so if I can find myself a niche somewhere in there, that'd be good. Hell, if it means I can combine my graphic design skills with my academic ones, that would be verging on a dream job.

And on a completely different note, I sprained my thumb while at Tynemouth by launching myself up onto a ledge and not bracing my hand properly. I didn't even notice it until it kept hurting a week or so later, but yes, definitely a sprain or a strain. It was a very stupid injury, and now I can't play the piano properly for another fortnight or so. Grar.

Okay, I suppose I should actually try and work now. I'm going to experiment with this split-screen capability Scrivener has to work out this editing/blending plan. This program's superiority to Microsoft Word continues to amaze in new and interesting ways!

Tynemouth

Last weekend, Maggie and Doris and I took the day off to go to Tynemouth, which is about a half-hour from Newcastle, out on the coast.

Basically, all I really need to say is that if anyone comes to visit me, this is where I'll take you. It's a short train- and metro-ride away, and even while it was a bit damp and cold, it was spectacularly beautiful. Observe:

This is the ruin of the priory. Just below it are cliffs and a beach that goes straight into the North Sea. It is spectacular and dramatic, and if I was a Romantic poet, I would be writing odes to it.

It's also an odd combination of the old and new, as the priory was built in 11th century, I believe, but the graveyard in the back is at least partially Victorian.

And then there's also a reproduction of a giant cannon-like gun from WWI on the coastal wall, which could apparently shoot bullets six inches in diameter seven miles out to sea. Pretty impressive.

But not nearly as pretty. I mean, really.

>

Pretty amazing. The town is gorgeous too, with townhouses that reminded me a bit of Bath, but the coast is rocky and treacherous and fun to navigate (at least for me--I had hiking boots on, and I have a weird liking for hopping around and balancing on rocky outcroppings. I'm getting in touch with my inner mountain goat, or something).

We also went to the local aquarium, which was unfortunately a rip-off, and walked along the coast for about two towns (which sounds impressive, but towns can be tiny, so it was only five miles, maybe). Still, the views were gorgeous, the weather mostly tolerable, and much fun was had. It's definitely a place to go in the summer as well, since a lot of the shops and restaurants were clearly seasonal, and probably due to open in April or May. There were some crazy people who were already surfing, but I get the feeling that everyone probably descends upon the place in June and July. I'll have to go again then.

I am living The Trial.

So my life has taken a turn for the Kafka-esque, which is to say that I nearly got deported because my visa was denied to me due to a paperwork oversight. Yes. Apparently this is my life.

Several heart attacks later, I am now making a new application which will once again take an absurd amount of time and paperwork to process. I am...annoyed, to say the least, particularly because I have plans to go to Paris, and I would really like for that to still happen. I deserve to be able to come and go from this country as I please! Christ on a cracker.

Anyway.

I obviously didn't get any work done this week because I was too busy chasing down letters and bank statements and other paraphernalia, but I'm hoping next week will be thoroughly productive. I'm taking the weekend off to see Newcastle's castle and aquarium, and then I'm meeting with my adviser on Monday to talk about work. I kind of also want to buy him a mug or something, because he wrote a really nice endorsement letter for my new visa application that was very supportive and complimentary and will hopefully butter up whoever processes my application at the home office.

Also! I'm doing a regional poster competition since I got awarded in the university one, so I get to edit my poster and reprint it, and then hang out at the town hall for a day again. It sounds like there are lots of interesting institutes and research groups from the northeast participating, so it should be fun. And there are cash prizes, which is definitely a plus.

And now, bonus material: Maggie has peer-pressured me into making a Tumblr. For those who may not know, Tumblr is a sort of microblogging site similar to Twitter, except with media content and no word limit. I like archiving pictures, videos and quotes that I like on it. So if you're interested, check out A Fine Anachronism. It is fun times, and has cool things in it!

Victory!

It seems my graphic design background has once again served me well, as I just won a prize in the Researcher's Poster Competition at the university. Best in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities! It was a lot of fun to do--talking about my research was great, I got to meet some really cool people (including one guy who apparently is from Longmeadow? It's a really small world), and there was free food. So altogether, a good day, and now I have extra grocery money for the next few weeks.

And now I really need to write instead of procrastinate over photoshop. Okay then!

So many books. SO MANY.

Whoops, it's been a while. And many things have happened!

The past few weeks have felt incredibly hectic for a number of reasons. I went to a few seminars on effective writing and making academic posters, which was fun and interesting (though a bit paranoia inducing regarding the writing--there may have been some talk of thesis defense, which I am not allowing myself to think about at the moment). I'm also taking German classes specifically tailored for academic use and reading, which definitely plays to my strengths rather than my weaknesses with language learning, so it's going fairly well. I'm actually determined to see the course through this time, which is a good sign.

I also got a haircut for the first time in nearly eight months because my hair had gotten completely out of control. It's still really long, longer than it's been in ages, but I had short layers put in so that the bottom half of it doesn't go all triangular and pouf-y when it dries now. Far more manageable. Next, I must re-dye.

I've also been doing some further exploring of Durham with my flatmates and found some nice places to eat, as well as places to go dancing. The club scene is heavily undergraduate, as to be expected, but still fun. It's at least doing a good job of giving me some balance between work and not-work, which I am frankly in need of at the moment. I can feel myself recalibrating my research strategies in reaction to how my last chapter turned out, and the transition isn't precisely smooth. I'm feeling better about it now, but there's been a lot of flailing around and feeling stymied and asking myself why the hell I thought I was suited to being an academic. Still not sure on that last front, but at least I've regained some sense of direction.

Thus, my research is now slowly taking shape and going in a rather different direction than I originally intended, but I think it may work. Trying to tie all of my literature to the Gothic, while possible, ended up being both limiting and difficult to argue for in terms of how useful it was to do, so I started poking around into some related but alternate approaches. This led to working with Romanticism at large which in turn led to mythology and historiography, and those are turning up some far more useful sources and ideas. So now I'm looking at the formation of modern myths about the Industrial Revolution, by way of 19th century, Romance-influenced literature. I even have a working title! The Rise of the Steam Demons sounds like some ridiculous sci-fi novel, but it is totally just a reworked quote from Carlyle, so its dramatic turn is entirely justified.

So I think this will be far more successful and interesting as a general topic, because it's so clear by the way we think about the Industrial Revolution now that in some ways we've enshrined it as a sort of semi-magical time of sudden development and technical genius, contrasted with the sort of romantic notion of dark, factory-stricken English cities. In other words, we've made it a mythical entity, in part because of how it was immortalized by its contemporary authors. I'm liking being sure that I'm doing something that actually pertains to modern culture.

All of the myth and historiographical stuff is completely new to me, however, which means that I'm doing tons of background reading in addition to my more primary documents. So now my room is smothered in books. The case for getting a Kindle is growing.

And finally, in non-academic and really out-of-character news, I went way outside of my comfort zone recently and went to a training weekend for a sort of anonymous student support phoneline, wherein I learned how to listen to people talk about their anxieties and emotional difficulties and offer support without actually giving advice. It was...definitely not my style of emotional support, and I didn't altogether agree with the organization's tenets, which is probably why I didn't ultimately get selected to do the work (and am thus able to talk about it, because as stated, it's anonymous), but it was eye-opening to get some education on psychological issues I've never experienced or had to deal with. It also alerted me to the fact that I've gotten way more direct and aggressive in my old age, and that other people are way less scientific about how they deal with emotion than I am. So you know, educational all around. Altogether, an interesting psychological experiment.

And there we are. I really hope the next few weeks are a bit calmer so I can hunker down, do some job applications, and actually shape my mountains of notes into some articulate material.

I CANNOT CONTAIN MY GLEE.

Oh my god oh my god, Maggie and I are seeing David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing in the spring. I'M SO EXCITED RIGHT NOW.

I knew there was a reason I wanted to go to school in England!

Huzzah!

I have finished my first thesis chapter!

...it may be a bit crap at the end. But I'll fix that...in a few months. When looking at it doesn't make my brain emit distressed screeching noises and jam to a halt.

The point is, 11,000 words down, 79,000 to go. Give or take.

I think I'm going to not think for the weekend. It'll be nice.

On the flip side, though, I've discovered that the postgraduate room in one of the main buildings is the absolute best, because it has a mini kitchen and a hot water dispenser, so I can drink my absurd amounts of tea while spending absurd amounts of time finishing papers. Very excellent.

That is all.

Edit: I just got my master's degree in the mail. Hooray! I'm now qualified for...something. And over-qualified for a bunch of other things....hooray!