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 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.

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!

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.

ahahaha oh god

Well, my introduction and first chapter are now finished and sent off, hopefully in a state that can be considered adequate. I can't tell myself, as towards the end I just found myself just cutting and pasting paragraphs over and over again hoping that eventually all of the pieces will fit together smoothly, until all of the words ran together and began looking like scribbles. It was around the time that I started blithely throwing around 'Foucaultian', like that's what normal people do, that I decided it was time to stop.

I'm not even writing about Foucault. What is happening to me.

Anyway, I start in on Goethe possibly tomorrow, more probably Tuesday. Hopefully it will take less time, and not require a new chapter to spring up out of nowhere. Once is probably already too much for that.

Onwards and upwards

So that whole overbooking myself like a boss thing is still going on, as should be readily apparent given that I haven't updated in an age. List format once again becomes my last resort. So!

THINGS THAT HAVE GOTTEN DONE:

1. My last chapter. It still needs a lot of work, but it exists.
2. Classes! I had a couple of really lovely last sessions with my Novel students this term, going through some exam questions, answering queries about what to expect, and it was very productive. I should probably start modelling all of my class plans after the one I devised for this last one, it worked really well.
3. Marking. I have done all the marking. And was very pleased on the whole! Everyone got better at writing and expressing themselves. I was very proud. Of course, I've also been recruited to do exam marking, so at the end of May I am going to be swamped with nearly fifty scribbly panicked exam scripts. Oy. At least I'm getting paid. 
4. My lecture! It was written in full, and delivered in full with accompanying powerpoint. Hopefully it was helpful to people. I thought it turned out all right in the end. Good to know that I am in fact capable of interpreting poetry, albeit not very creatively. My voice was very tired by the end--an hour is a long time to talk.
5. I presented the material for my reading group this month. We looked at Leavis and a Humphrey Jennings war propaganda film, and it was a lot of fun! I learned a lot from hearing other people's perspectives on Leavis especially--much food for thought for editing said last chapter.

THINGS THAT ARE IMMINENT:

1. My editing plan. I'm making a list of all the major things that need to happen to all of my chapters to make them not suck. I am currently halfway through, and intend to finish the rest tomorrow. It is already about four pages in long hand. Ughhhh. 
2. DULTA starts tomorrow. But guess what? The cold snap has ended! It has been lovely and warm, and I have been wearing dresses all week. My mood has been accordingly far lighter, it's pretty amazing. So I won't have to be grumpy about having to walk two and a half miles to the other side of town at nine in the morning every Friday. Or rather, I will be grumpy, but not as grumpy as I would have been in the winter.
3. I have a completion review coming up, wherein I apparently report upon how I'm getting on with my work, whether it will be done on time, and possibly decide on a title? I'm currently dithering on that front. But in any case, that's happening. Which is scary in and of itself. I'm trying not to think about it. 
4. The public engagement project, which is ongoing and taking up quite a bit of my time. Trying to get so many people in academia and heritage and archive sites together in the same place at the same time is exhausting. On the other hand, though, we have a website, where you can check out what we're doing. It should be really good, once it all comes together! But oh man, it's a lot of work. Work which involves talking to people, which I am the worst at. 

So yeah, this whole busy-ness thing isn't really letting up. And probably won't until, uh, July? At which point I will just be editing. Editing forever. 

At least it's sunny out. 

:D?

Overbooking myself LIKE A BOSS.

I am taking on more things because if I have lots of things to do then more of them will get done more efficiently. Logic!

This week, I am finishing my chapter, come hell or high water, despite the fact that I spent the entirety of yesterday on a footnote, because I am the worst. To be fair, it was a very complicated footnote that provides lots of background information and sources, but still. A footnote. Jeez. But now that I've done that, I can move on from all of the contextual stuff I've been building and actually get to the things I'm trying to say.

It will be helpful if I can remember what those things are.

Other things on my plate: I've gotten a place on the DULTA program for Easter term, which is the university's learning and teaching award class. It's recognised nationally and will make me accredited to teach, which is pretty essential, as things go. It means I will be trekking across town every Friday, which I won't mind so long as this cold snap ceases before then. Grr. Coldest March in fifty years, apparently. GRR.

I'm also now giving a lecture...on Romanticism! The English department offers a Saturday in April for postgrads to lecture to the undergrads, so that the undergrads can use it for revision, and the postgrads get a chance to practice giving a full-length talk. There was no Victorian module this year, though, so I was restricted to proposing something either about the novels I teach or Romanticism, and for variety's sake (and the fact that all of my ideas for lectures on the novel were terrible) I chose the latter. So after I finish my chapter, I have to write a few thousand words on Prometheus and Shelley. Luckily, I have a friend who is an expert on Shelley, and the professor who teaches the module has offered to meet with me if I'm having trouble, so I have brains to pick at my disposal.

Also, marking has to happen sometime in there. Boo!

As for what happens after the end of the academic year--I've just marked up my calendar with weeks in which I will be doing concentrated editing of each of my chapters, with week breaks in between, and if I stick to it, I will have a completed draft by the end of September.

On the other hand, however, my calendar now looks angry and red.

...I don't know whether this has been a helpful exercise. I might have to counteract it with some comic books.

Life update, and a castle!

I have been terribly remiss with updates, so for the sake of expediency this one shall be in bullet form, at least for part of the way.

• Trip home was lovely, wonderful to see those who I was able to see, sad to miss those I didn't, but Christmas will come soon enough! My tickets are booked, I'll be in the States for three weeks over the holidays, hurrah!
• I was struck down by food poisoning last weekend, and thus managed to miss both a singing lesson and a class, which was most unfortunate. Basically, when the price of a sandwich is too good to be true, it probably is. Lesson learned.
• I had a long and very intensive meeting with my advisor last week which was both productive and terrifying--in sum, I have a great deal more work to do before my thesis is truly up to snuff, but I have a clearer sense of what precisely that work entails, so all hope is not lost. 
• I'm now looking around for a topic for my last chapter, and I'm leaning towards looking at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a sort of framework for looking at the development of public reception of technology, both the good and the bad, and seeing if some of those pesky mythological narratives are coming through beyond the bounds of Marx and company. I have to do more reading before I can decide that it's a productive route, but I have high hopes. 
• The next couple of weeks will be very busy because I am teaching my usual classes plus filling in for one more, and there is a fair amount of choir happening because we're ramping up towards the advent procession that we do every year in the cathedral, which was really lovely last time, so I'm looking forward to it. Also, right after that I'm grading essays madly and having even more choir things to do, so basically it's all going to be one big run-up until the end of term, at which point I will be very glad indeed to take a breather, I imagine. 
• So that's that!

On a more picturesque and relaxed note, however, my flatmate had some friends from uni up to visit this weekend, and I got to tag along today on a day trip they were making. We headed up north to Craster, which is a seaside village about forty miles up from Newcastle that is home to the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, a very melancholy and lovely heap of rocks indeed. This was a perfect opportunity for me to give this whole taking-pictures-with-a-fancy-camera thing a go, and hopefully I had some success? The lighting was not ideal, as it was overcast and we're far enough into winter that the sun is very low and it starts getting dark around 3:30. Nevertheless, with some photoshop adjustments a couple of these might be passable. Though now that I've messed around with them, the coloration is very inconsistent. Bear with me:

The town of Craster. Dear parents: You may want to add this to your list of ideal retirement spots. Whoops, totally under-did the contrast.

The castle, which is many fields farther from town than this indicates. In between is prime sheep-grazing and dog-walking territory.

A better indicator of distance.

The shore along the North Sea. It was very Byronic.

It was about 2:30 when this picture was taken. WELCOME TO THE NORTH. IT IS VERY DARK HERE.

Inside the castle. I really like ruined architecture.

From one of the upper floors, or what's left of it. Check out the awesome lichen!

Oh wait, with this camera I can actually photograph the lichen! LICHEN. This is actually an accurate depiction of the colour--a right proper saffron.

One more washed-out look.

How gorgeous is that? Ah, to have friends of friends with cars. Otherwise, I'd never get to the heritage sites that are around here. 

I am returned to the countryside

After much jaunting about, I am back in Bishop Auckland, and it is a very well-timed transition indeed, seeing as internet has still not been restored in my flat, and we may be forced to switch providers because man, the customer service has really not been great.

But I have internet here, so huzzah! For me, at least. My poor housemates remain deprived. Hopefully it'll be back online soon.

The inaugural NENC symposium was a great success! We had a good crowd, lots of good papers and questions to go with, and a lovely dinner afterwards. My advisor unexpectedly showed up for the afternoon, which completely frazzled me for a short while, but he seemed to have a good time as well, so I'm glad he was able to stop in. Now all that's left to do is mopping up loose ends and doing lots of reimbursement forms for people.

Other than that, I've now just been settling back into dog-walking and getting up early and trying to get my stupid chapter edits done. The progress at this point is moving at a glacial pace, but I'm determined to be done with everything at least before I start teaching. It may be a struggle. A struggle full of me wailing about how much I have yet to learn because I haven't gotten around to reading ALL THE THINGS, never mind that reading all the things when on a deadline is impossible.

I'm finding that academic writing is, for me, like the Kubler-Ross stages of dying, and right now I'm doing a cross between bargaining and depression--bargaining consists of saying 'If I manage to write 500 words today, I am allowed to relax for the evening' or something of the sort, and depression consists of the aforementioned 'I'M NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO KNOW ALL THE THINGS THAT I NEED TO KNOW TO MAKE THIS PERFECT, WHY GOD WHY'. At some point soon, I'm hoping to reach acceptance and then just plunge face first into finishing everything. So there you go, a glimpse into the ridiculousness.

I think that's about it, for now. I have teacher training on the 26th to go over my English department gig--hopefully they've kept the syllabus for Intro to the Novel similar enough that I won't have to buy many more books--and then it's back to the academic year. This summer has gone by monstrously fast!

My dependency upon the internet is truly astonishing.

Over the past few days the internet in the house has gone from spotty to altogether gone, such that I have been forced out to Elvet Riverside on a weekend in order to check in with the outside world. This has, of course, further reminded me of just how ludicrously dependent I am on being able to access internet things for everything from banking to email to tech support, the latter of which is especially difficult, seeing as I am in need of tech support about our router, so yeah.

But! On the other hand, getting a chance to check my email meant that I was informed that I have also gotten the teaching job for Combined Honours! So that was excellent to hear, and I'm looking forward to getting my head around some new material.

Other things: I went and attended the workshop in intellectual history, and it was very interesting! And also very, very oriented towards the assumption that I knew lots of things about philosophy, particularly early modern iterations of it, which...I don't? So it was a little intimidating, and I haven't decided whether it was actually helpful or not. But the people were very nice, and the seminar I was assigned to was more approachable than the larger discussions, so it wasn't a bust, by any means.

Incidentally, getting this second teaching job means that I will now be getting that crash course in early modern intellectual history which I clearly needed this past week. So hey! Swings and roundabouts.

And now, I continue to be very busy indeed, since the symposium is on Wednesday, so I have to sort out all of the printing and stuff which hopefully is happening on time, and I still have to sort out my chapters and get them to not be crap so that I can start October fresh. I have decided that I greatly dislike editing. Or at least, editing things that I wrote over a year ago, and are therefore not at all up to the standard I'd like them to be. Anyway.

First in my priorities, though, is fixing our stupid internet. I need it for things, and having it on my phone is not enough.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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 am in the Rachmaninov groove.

Well, after a very dysfunctional Christmas in which my visa came three days late, causing me to nearly give myself an ulcer, and then I caught my third case of the flu this season, things seem to be getting back to normal. I have one last thing to do with this frigging thesis chapter, and then I can print it and send my computer off to be rehabilitated. Oy.

And if that can happen by the end of tomorrow, then I won't have to worry about it when Maggie and her boyfriend and I all go up to Edinburgh for the ridiculous New Year's street fair. It's going to be fun times! I'm going to wear fifty sweaters.

In other news...guys, my Rachmaninov Etude-Tableaux are going to be so badass! The first one's nearly up to tempo, the second one's finished completely, and I've started learning the third one, which is turning out not as hard as I was expecting it to be. I mean, it's still hard, and he still expects me to have hands the size of small dinosaurs, but I'm totally going to finish these pieces by spring. They are fun. Fun and dark and very, very Russian. I approve!

I've noticed that good things are happening to my form too. I'm having a much easier time relaxing my hands and being fast without being tense. I'm playing a bit more the way Tom Sauer wanted me to, I think. In any case, it's definitely paying off in terms of retaining stamina through fast passages full of large intervals and such which is, you know, useful with Rachmaninov.

And after that, I will actually finish bringing Ravel's Sonatine back. I started to a while ago and then stopped halfway through. And then I shall have a nice working repertoire. Ooo, and also that Schubert sonata from forever ago! I found the sheet music to that on my hard drive for some reason and now I want to relearn that. So many good pieces! They are putting me in a good mood.

Okay, H.G. Wells. You and I have a date with Marx.