Final Thoughts

Well, they might not be entirely final. But there's an ending to be marked here, so I intend to mark it.

I'm heading home for the foreseeable, as my visa runs out soon, my flat contract runs out tomorrow, and my degree is done. It's super official now--I've not only sent off some giant boxes to journey overseas at a leisurely pace until they get to the States, but I've also been informed that my thesis corrections have been accepted, so I can now for-real call myself 'Doctor'. So now, I'm on the road to the next thing.

What that thing is remains unknown at the moment. I guess we'll see.

Studying in Britain has been amazing for me. I can't really stress it enough. Anglophilia aside, I've just met some excellent people here, and been to some amazing places. Out of necessity, I've gotten better at being a real person. And the old, difficult, self-conscious personality of this country has suited me in ways I can't fully articulate, but which make me feel at home, and have made me comfortable even at the earliest stages of being here. But really, what matters is that I am going to miss the friends I've made here the most, and I'm going to miss them terribly. The internet will keep us close, but it won't be the same.

Academia-wise, I still have a long way to go. I can't claim to be a great scholar, but I've learned a lot. I've got a lot of motivation to learn more. And hell, I've written 200-ish pages of stuff. And it might not even be terrible stuff! I guess that's worth noting.

The coming months are going to be strange and hard and filled with bragging about myself for the benefit of various job applications, but no matter what, I've a feeling that I'll be thinking about cool weather and dark pubs, trudging up steep cobblestoned hills, of taking trains to everywhere, and out the window seeing brick rows of flats circling round Durham Cathedral and lining the bridges over the Tyne and the Wear.

Damn, I'm going to miss this place so much.

also:

I cut off all my hair again!

And for free as well--hurrah for loyalty cards.

To be honest, I'm mostly excited about not having to use so much shampoo and conditioner now; it was getting a bit excessive.

well, it's begun

I had a fantastic time back in the States, going to J's wedding, partying and catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, and then going down the California coast before relaxing a bit at home. But now, it is back to work.

I have sent in my first postdoc applications. I hope I did an okay job on them. The opportunities are very exciting! And start very soon, so at least I will find out whether I'm in or out very soon. One of them is particularly intriguing, and will let me work on exactly the things I want to work on, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that one.

I'm also flagging up applications for things starting up next fall. It's all very...daunting. The pressure of more immediate deadlines is at least keeping me distracted from the vast amount of competition that exists in the States.

...LOVE ME, UNIVERSITIES, PLEASE LOVE ME.

Other than that, it's article-writing time! I've got a thousand words down on Danny Boyle and the London Olympics, and feel cautiously good about it. It's very refreshing to be working on something that doesn't have a huge canon of scholarly attention looming behind it. I can actually read all of the things do with it in a reasonable amount of time, which is strange and wondrous. I am rediscovering the pleasures of working in cafés. Also, journalism is generally much easier to read than long tomes on Goethe.

Also, I just booked tickets home, and for the first time, registered myself as 'Doctor'. British Airways immediately sent me a confirmation email addressing me as Dr K. This was disproportionately thrilling.

Ta for now--I went to Hadrian's Wall this weekend, which was good fun, but I haven't processed all the photos yet, so those will be up as soon as I get a chance to do that.

Lindisfarne

I'm procrastinating doing my corrections, so it's time for photos!

I went to Holy Island this past weekend on a day trip for postgrads. It's a semi-detached island off the coast of Northumbria, where St. Cuthbert hid from Vikings, and the English defended themselves from the Scots, and is presently home to extremely cute cottages, a surprisingly small castle on a very big hill, and also a meadery. Also, some great views.

Unfortunately, the afternoon did not begin auspiciously, weather-wise:

The shoreline...

...leading up to the castle

 I struggled mightily trying to relearn how to make the camera do things.

Raindrops on grass. ART WAS ATTEMPTED.

 I completely bollixed up the interior shots, but it was surprisingly unimpressive--the castle had been renovated into a summer home at the end of the nineteenth century, leading to it becoming a rather cosy place, all told. The only shot that came out at all was the kitchen:

Cosy!

The hill is largely responsible for the castle looking as imposing as it does.

I attempt nature photography.

A slightly nicer shot of the exterior? Bit too dark, had weird problems with colour. OVERCAST LIGHTING! *shakes fist*

But then, miraculously, while I had lunch in a pub, the skies cleared, and the rest of the afternoon became glorious, just in time to check out the priory and graveyard. Huzzah for picturesque ruins!

The island in the background is the castle. It looks far more impressive from that distance.

Graveyard shot.

More high contrast shenanigans. It was so bright all of a sudden!

Further attempted nature photography. Totally a high concept commentary on life and death, with that little bird and the headstone. I totally did that on purpose.Totally.

The path leading away from the priory, towards the beach.

The beach! I really like this shot, actually. That kid's red jacket was fortuitous.

Since the island is only cut off during high tide, when the tide is low you can walk out and everything is covered in seaweed and mussels. I felt bad about walking on them. Also, there's a tiny crab hiding in this photo, under a rock. It refused to be photogenic.

A view of the priory and church from the beach.

There are giant obelisks on the English coast to serve as guides for ships, presumably, but they mostly just look cool and alien from the island.

Someone attempting to fish.

More obelisks!

And again.

Clearly, I only sort of remembered how to do photography by the end. But all in all, it was a very enjoyable day out.

long-overdue updaaaate

So, uh. Doctorate accomplished! Waiting on my list of corrections. I've been told I may need to gently prod the department into giving them to me. I have a few months to finish them, in any case. All in all, it was an almost disconcertingly painless experience.

I'm currently occupying my time with building an online archive for the journal of the H.G. Wells Society. It's fun work, though it took me a long time to get back into the swing of web design. I've hopefully gotten most of the programming out of the way now, so now it's just figuring out how to upload and organise the issues. I've also been asked to maybe update the Society's main website as well, which is should be fun and a little more straightforward, considering it doesn't require the installation of a huge journal framework, which the other site did. (It is also fairly in need of a facelift, so I'm kind of itching to make it pretty). And hey, maybe then the Society will hire me for more work! I like work.

Tomorrow I leave for Prague to go toodle around with the choir, sing some things, and drink good Czech beer. After that, however, I will continue with the Wells project and then actually start looking at the long-term job market (and probably sinking into a pit of despair in the process, argh). Oh, and also I have to start writing some articles for publication. That will be more fun.

This continues to be a very strange time. But at least I can sign off as "Dr" now.

whoops this month is terrifying

It is May Day, and I feel like yelling MAYDAY, MAYDAY.

...I may be slightly busy.

Viva is set, as previously stated, and my friends are doing me the huge favour of running a mock viva a week or so beforehand so I can get used to answering questions and not looking like a fool in the process. They are great, and are reading so much of my rambling, it's amazing.

I'm also doing a lunchtime recital for the Music Society, which happened sort of on a whim, but I'm hoping it'll garner some donations to the choir, and I'll get to play on a full concert grand, which is thrilling. Liszt and Debussy, a hard but familiar programme, and I'm sort of terrified, but also excited. Should be fun! Provided I don't crash and burn.

I have also landed a short research assistantship which will involve building a website and digitising the archives of an H.G. Wells journal, which is rad. I am going to be super rusty at web design, though, so it will also be a bit of an adventure. I have to get in contact with the professor I'm working with to see when I start, but it will likely be soon.

And finally, conference. I'm still not done with my paper, but it's almost there. It's been really difficult trying to pare down all of the various interconnected thoughts I have on the topic into something both coherent and succinct, and cutting and pasting from my thesis was really not helpful in that regard. Hopefully I will finish it tonight.

In sum, I am running on adrenaline and a multitasking haze for the foreseeable future. I'm super glad I took some time off before all this.

my day of judgement has been scheduled

Viva is officially on 19 May.

It is slightly too far away to commence freaking out, but it does mean that I need to finish my conference paper STAT so I can study up at my leisure. My two weeks of being completely useless are now over. How very strange this all is.

ta-daaaa!

SUBMISSION DAY POST OF HYSTERIA/JOY

I'm waiting for my thesis to finish getting printed and bound. It may take a while--three sets of 230 pages, 1.5 spacing, 12pt Garamond font, and twelve-ish illustrations, is a lot of paper.

Formatting is double-checked, grammar is triple-checked, and flaws have been agonized over and ultimately either fixed or deemed not so serious as to make everything else crumble around them. I spent a lot of last night peering at all of the things I've cut and rewritten over the past month, making sure I wasn't too overenthusiastic about the things I'd excised. A couple of times, I had been. So there was some further tweaking and replacing. I could probably tinker forever, so it's best that I stop now.

...This is weird. But also pretty great. I'm going to have several drinks after this, provided I don't fall asleep immediately. But yeah, mostly weird.

Wow.


P.S.: I also found out that I got some funding for my conference in Canada. Between my college and my department, I should get most of the costs of flights and accommodation defrayed. I shall have to start planning my paper soon. All in all, this day is shaping up pretty well.

there was paperwork filed, there is no escape now

Thesis Title: The Mythistory of the Machine: Constructing the narrative of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century writing

Expected Date of Submission: 24 March 2014

my schedule is now filled

Sorry about the long absence, and happy new year! Stuff has happened. Things. Stuff AND things. The rundown:

Break was lovely! Great to see everyone. Inevitable travel mishaps were had. But they were outweighed by many good things, so on the whole, win!

I basically have been in a state of jetlag/stress-induced sleep madness since returning. Sleeping between 5am and noon is no longer an anomaly. As long as I get to all of my scheduled things on time, I've decided not to care.

The editing is happening. Slowly, but it is happening. I feel okay about the things I'm talking about, and deleting the things that I don't feel okay about. I might even understand the second part of Faust now. Amazing.

I got into a massive conference in Ontario. It's going to be an excursion! We will go to Niagara Falls and wine country and see some theatre and then I will present a good paper so that people in America might actually know who I am when I apply for jobs. All good things. Now I need to find funding for the plane ticket. Yikes.

I have a vague schedule for completing everything, and it involves submitting in a month, doing the viva in April-ish, writing the conference paper in May, and then hurtling back and forth between time zones to go to said conference, then home, then Prague, then commencement, then Seattle, then home again. The logistics escape me at the moment, but I'm not thinking about it until the thesis is done. So there.

Oh also, I've started learning German again as a procrastination tool. Don't ask. It's a cool system though: Duolingo basically makes learning into an online game of quizzes, and you can alternate between practicing what you already know and learning new things at your own pace. So far it actually seems to be sticking this time around, which would be a first. We'll see if I can keep it up.

I am now not allowed to say yes to any more things.

I have discovered pdfs of two volumes of collected contralto pieces published in 1900, copyright free, ranging from arias to Scottish airs. Overall, it's about 400 pages of music that's in my vocal range.

Guess what I'll being doing when not editing??

Lumiere, aka adventures in night photography

I have been felled by a head cold, which has made Marx nigh incomprehensible to me. This is very inconvenient, as I am supposed to be editing my Marx chapter at the moment. I am five pages in, and it is terrible. Both the chapter, and my efforts towards fixing it.

This is all very problematic. So I decided to ignore all that this evening, and go to Lumiere instead.

Lumiere is a big light show that has now come to Durham twice, and is pretty much a series of public art installations which play off of their architectural surrounds to look cool and maybe say something interesting. It's a big tourist attraction, and is lovely and fun. When it was here last, I was on my way back from a conference and had a very enjoyable wander about in it while discombobulated by travel and sleep-deprivation. This time, I planned ahead, put on my awesome Russian hat, and brought my camera!

Let the adventure in night photography begin:

A scale model of the sun, installed on the university's science site. It shifted and changed presumably in an accurate depiction of the sun's currents and spots. Also, there was creepy music, and a projection of an eye on the side of the library.

On the way up to the cathedral. Don't ask, I have no idea.

The cathedral was subject to a massive light show that ran through, from what I could tell, the history of the north east's religious life, from the invasions of the vikings, to the writing of the Lindisfarne Gospels, to the construction of the cathedral itself. It was backed in surround sound by appropriate monastic chanting through to 18th century orchestral music. Very, very cool.

Some of the manuscript illuminations projected onto the cathedral.

Depiction of the cathedral's construction.

Inside was a more abstract installation--wires randomly gnarled and suspended between the columns, plus light projectors, made for a strange, ever-shifting lightning bug-type effect. I had a major struggle getting shots of it in the darkness.

The actual projections, versus how they presented on the wires.

In the cathedral's courtyard. Ghostly dresses!

They were fibre-optic, so they shifted colour every few seconds.

I definitely only scratched the surface of the exhibit, and there were some parts which I did see but the crowds were too annoying or the installation was too movement-oriented to be worth photographing. Still, it was great to have a look around despite it being cold and rather wet. Having been mostly inside moping, sleeping, and blowing my nose for the past three days, this was a welcome respite.

Short update!

Things that have happened:

• I had a birthday, marking my steady progress towards uncoolness and calling undergraduates 'you damn kids'. I celebrated with fireworks and sword-dancing and friends and mulled wine. It was good. If I move outside of Britain, I'm going to miss having fire and explosions on my birthday.
• I had a meeting with my supervisor. It was scary but productive. I'm working through the holidays, with an aim to submit my thesis by 1st Feb. I am feeling slightly oppressed, but maybe this will be motivating.
• My students are great this year, and have unprompted and stimulating conversations with each other so that I don't have to do all of the work. We yammered about Robinson Crusoe today, and it was super enjoyable. I hope their essays are good. 
• I had an extended solo/chamber part in choir for Batten's Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis the other day. It went okay! Hooray for composers who wrote good alto parts. 
• Nicole gave me a lovely iris plant for my birthday, which is now sitting and percolating on my bookshelf, waiting to flower in a few months. And my friend Vicky gave me this:

Greatest hat, or GREATEST HAT?

Soon, I will learn Russian and begin to recite morose poetry about the motherland in vodka bars. Brace yourselves. На здоровье!

Productivity was achieved.

I have handed in both my Carlyle chapter and my teaching portfolio in the last three days, my relief is infinite! Then I went to dinner with some choir people at Durham Castle, had lasagna and wine and felt weird about being basically the oldest person within a ten-person radius at the table (seriously, so many freshers, I AM AN OLD), and then went home and slept for a long, long time.

Next up: Marx. And then conclusion. BAM.

Also, I was super handy in the past week, as I patched up a massive hole in the wall of my room up against the window frame, which I'm pretty sure has been responsible for a draft for the past few years. I hadn't known it was there before because some old fastenings from a window blind that no longer exists was covering it up, but I was feeling procrastiductive and decided to get rid of them and voila, huge hole in the wall. So I troweled some polyfill into where all of mortar had disintegrated. Now my room will hopefully be warmer, hooray!

I am taking the weekend off, and then there will once again be many things to do. But I am not thinking about them today.

Progress is being made.

I am nearly done with my Carlyle chapter, only one more section to re-write, and it's one of the easier ones, so I'm hoping it gets done today or tomorrow. SO. I am tentatively on schedule still. Tentatively.

In the meantime, teaching has started! It makes such a difference to have both of my classes in the afternoon--everyone (including me) is so much more awake and ready to talk. I have slightly bigger groups this year, but they seem chatty and clever, so hopefully they will do most of the work for me. We've been placed, however, in one of the classrooms that got flooded last winter, so if that happens again, we may be relocated to somewhere far-flung and inconvenient, which would be very annoying. Fingers crossed for a less rainy winter.

Choir is also up and running, and my friend Jessica and I are pushing for tour this spring to go to Prague. Less expensive than many other places, some great venues, and one of my favourite cities! I hope it happens. But then again, Brussels and Bruges would also not be a hardship. In terms of music, we've got some good repertoire going, and at long last I have encountered a choir director who doesn't mind letting the altos sing the other voice parts in the Faure Requiem when we have nothing to do. I've had a serious resentment of that piece for years now because it's so good and yet the altos get TOTALLY SHAFTED. Two full movements with about three bars of participation, it's infuriating. So I'm glad I can hang out on the tenor and bass (or soprano, depending on how my voice is doing) parts this time around. Singing in bass clef! Good times.

It is getting cooler and more damp now, and the days are noticeably shorter once more. I have unpacked my sweaters and second duvet. My tea consumption is about to double. Maybe the extra caffeine will make me more efficient...

So I guess it's likely that I'm in the correct line of work if...

...after having just finished editing a thesis chapter and sent it off, I started doing some curious Googling of an author that had cropped up tangentially in said chapter, and within an evening had assembled a 20-entry bibliography and sent an inquiry email to a periodicals service to ask about a pamphlet the author wrote, which they have buried among various other obscure volumes, because while said author's poetry has been published (recently, even!), it seems that no one has published his albeit limited prose, despite the fact that he was briefly in correspondence with Dickens, and was, from what I can gather, basically an angry, unpleasant, alcoholic, working class Glaswegian version of Blake, 'dark Satanic Mills' included. That's like, basically all of my favourite things to study in one person, how can no one have written on this dude?

In conclusion, I have lost control of my life, but I have a great topic for an article.

Trip to Bern/Communing with the Shelleys in the Alps

More photos! This time with decidedly less imminent rain.

So I went to Bern to meet up with le grandmother, hang out away from my computer, and generally toodle about a new city for a bit. It was fab, and I managed to get more work done there than I had in the week previous, so that was a bit of a relief. Bern is lovely, exceedingly accessible and almost obsessively clean, and it was balmy and bright for three out of the four days I was there, which was fantastic. With no further ado, to the photos! (Sorry, there are a lot of them. I was a total tourist. In fact, these should probably go under a cut.)

Terrible experiments in photography, aka trip to Gibside

So I will be spamming with photos of Bern in a very short while, but first! In August, a couple of friends and I went on a day trip to Gibside, which is a giant sprawling 18th century estate outside of Newcastle, and I have some terrible attempts at photography to show for it. It was a very grey day and began raining towards the end, so the lighting was terrible, but we did have a lot of fun looking at English bourgeois imitations of Palladian architecture, imagining what it would be like to ride horses around a giant rambling estate, and being sorely tempted to climb some fences to get a closer look at some of the more falling-apart buildings (we eventually refrained, because all of us are on visas and deportation would probably be inconvenient). So! Some highly manipulated and sketchy photos:

The chapel for the Bowes family, who owned the estate. SUPER PALLADIAN. There was someone playing terrible pop songs on the piano inside, which kind of ruined the effect. Nonetheless, very pretty.

There was a big walled-in garden. B decided that she needed one for her future home.

I attempt to be artistic! Flowers were actually shootable without the weather ruining everything.

More flowers. 

The entrance to the garden.

There were apple trees badly in need of picking.

FAVOURITE PART: The orangerie. 

I am utterly failing to capture how awesome the orangerie was. It is descending into ruin very prettily.

Was all glassed-in with state-of-the-art windows and roof during the 19th century.

Tried really hard to be artistic. Filters and gradients fail me.

Giant monument to liberty on the other side of the estate. Ridiculously ostentatious and great.

The banquet hall, which you can't actually get inside at the moment, which is very frustrating. Photo had to be taken from down the hill and across a manmade pond. 

So there you are, fun at National Trust sites, followed by fun with photoshop/lightroom! B and I are hopefully going to try and do more trips like this, because it was really easy to get to by bus, and a nice break from research.

Thankfully, the upcoming photos of Bern are far nicer, because there was real sunshine. Also, I'm slowly getting better at fixing white balance and stuff, so. Please stand by!

Playing Rachmaninoff in the Tate

So I went to London for a couple of days to take a break from editing, and it was fabulous! I stayed with my friend Marie, who is lovely and very connected with the cultural scene of London, which I benefited from immensely. When I first arrived in the evening, she took me to see some avant garde immersion theatre by the Arbonauts, which was based on Italo Calvino's 1957 fantasy novel, The Baron in the Trees. It was very strange, and I definitely didn't even begin to understand it until I went and googled the novel later, but it was very fun nonetheless, with some gorgeous music and minimalist set pieces, which were all set up in Nunhead Cemetery. I highly recommend people go and see the cemetery itself, by the way, as it's a bit outside the centre of London, and incredibly beautiful, affording a fantastic view of the city. The show was performed as the sun set, so that it started out outside while it was light out, and ended inside the roofless central chapel lit by candlelight as the sky went dark. Even if the content of the performance was fairly opaque, the aesthetic was very effective.

The following morning, we went and saw the 'David Bowie Is...' exhibition at the V&A, aka my favourite museum of all time, and it was also fabulous--full of amazing stage costumes and massive video installations, and lots of really excellent commentary on Bowie as a cultural critic and his interactions with surrealism and various other artists and art movements.

(Did I manage to relate it to my thesis? Of course I did. Commentary on the space age and the isolation of the modern condition! Machine culture! It was rad.)

Also, I bought a t-shirt that says 'David Bowie is Watching You' on the back, because of reasons.

After that, we went and grabbed sushi for lunch on the south bank, and as we had some hours free before I had to catch my train back to Durham, we headed over to the Tate Modern. Marie has a membership, which meant I actually got to look around the temporary exhibitions as well as the permanent collections, which was great fun! Some really interesting international artists, including an installation which was pretty much an interactive museum inside the museum--various rooms of exhibitions, plus several 'classrooms' with activities for children, like building blocks and a playable piano. As a result, Marie and I built an awesome fort, and then waited out a mob of Japanese students for a chance to play the piano.

And that's how I ended up playing Rachmaninoff at the Tate on a Friday afternoon. For a 24-hour trip, I'd say it was a resounding success.