Random Bi-Polar Day!

So...

...my dissertation is done. WOO!

Fifty-six pages, including titles and bibliography. I'm pretty stoked about it. It's at the point where the things that I see wrong with it are things that I'm not really sure how to fix yet, so I think it's done to the best of my present abilities, and everything else will be a matter of what I have to learn next to be a better scholar.

So that's the good news.

On the flip side, everything else today was completely dysfunctional.

Firstly, the entire university apparently decided that one bank holiday wasn't enough, and that they should have another one. So in addition to being closed down with the rest of England on Monday, they were also completely closed down today. Without telling anyone.

No announcements or warnings, just signs on the doors and posted up online if you actually take the time to look not on the main website, but the library websites. Grar.

I've been kind of irritated with them lately anyway, just because it seems like every convenient computer lab has been closed or under construction this summer, which meant that even if I could find one open with a printer, scanning was out. So today was sort of the icing on the cake, and there may have been some very thorough cursing on my part.

And I was one of the lucky ones, because some of the postgrad deadlines are tomorrow, and not a week from now like mine.

So, after lugging all the books I have to return to the library there and then back to my flat, I managed to track down an independent printing and binding company down the road that does great work and doesn't run on the university's schedule. I ended up queuing with all of the business and communications postgrads who have everything due on the 1st. It took about an hour, but in the end my dissertation was printed and bound and looking very tidy and professional. But, since the university is completely shut up, I can't hand it in until tomorrow.

After that I ran errands like changing my address at the bank, but then I return home to find that my inkwell has, after months of hanging out in my bag with my fountain pen and behaving itself, mysteriously exploded in my bag. Luckily it didn't do much to my dissertation beyond a small smudge on one cover, but I definitely can't use the pocket it was in until the ink dries, and my hand looks like it belongs to a medieval scribe, considering how stained it is.

So yeah, it's been a special day. I had planned on getting everything out of the way today in terms of wrapping things up here, but clearly that was just far too tidy. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit more together, because along with tonight it is going to be crazy packing madness. And then I am off to Durham! Hurrah!

Black Holes and Revelations

The internet is down at my flat, so I'm chilling in the library today! Which is a good thing anyway, because I need to get work done.

I saw Spamalot at the Leeds Grand Theatre yesterday, which was quite fun. I rather wish I'd seen it on Broadway, just because part of the hilarity stems from just how big the production was, and how that makes a joke of Broadway culture in general. They had to change the lines of 'You can't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews' too, which just defeats the whole purpose of the song. It was a little disappointing. But everything else was quite good. The theatre itself was gorgeous, so I'll have to go again for a concert or something. Afterward Erin and I had drinks and dinner with her friend Lorna, who's also a classics student and really lovely. We all may try to go to Haworth this weekend, weather and travel arrangements permitting. At last, I shall commune with the Brontës!

My last adviser meeting went well--we talked about my latest section, and it seems that I used my critical sources better this time around, but need to inject some more direction into my argument earlier on. But that is easily solved! I also asked him about whether Ruskin would be useful as a direct discussion of the Gothic, despite him discussing it in architecture rather than literature, and it seems that I can. So now there are many more avenues of analysis I can open up from there, so long as I justify it. All in all, it was very productive, and my professor assured me that he was now confident that I'll be able to finish the work well and in good time. I'm glad at least one of us feels that way. So now I'm onto Marx, and then shall face the task of editing and stringing all these thing together. Argh! But I'm excited anyway.

Also exciting? The idea that the universe is actually the singularity of a black hole from another universe. Isn't that awesome? Something similar is discussed in Brian Greene's book, but I have to go back and read it to make sure. But oh man, that means that all the black holes in our universe could actually be other universes. SO COOL. And that it explains the forward motion of time itself? You can't see me over here, but I'm freaking out and flailing my hands around, and I'm glad I'm not in a very visible place in the library.

...Also apparently I've given myself permission to use caps in this blog now. The World Cup brought my outdoor voice into the blogosphere. You're welcome, internet. And by the way, congrats, Spain--Holland was mean and kicked your dude in the chest, so I'm glad you won. I'm sort of sad I have to wait another four years for the madness to return.

Oh yes, and finally: My hair is bright red now! I finally found dye that works! It's very exciting. I shouldn't say bright, it's more of a vibrant maroon or something. Anyway, it's awesome. I haven't done something this different to my hair in ages.

Okay, Marx now.

OMG WORLD CUP

The World Cup should happen all the time, because then I stay at the cross trainer way longer and run way faster than usual. I did 8km during the first half. COME ON SPAIN!

I mean, what? I know this is totally unlike me, but the obsession is terribly infectious, and watching is really exciting and communal. Yelling in pubs is great fun. And it's one of those transparent games where even if you're a layman, you can tell when a team is working well together and such. So, yeah, I'm enjoying getting into the spirit.

Anyway, my goal is to write 2000 words tonight, and it's going to happen no matter what. But not until football is over.

...Okay, it's over. SO EXCITED FOR SATURDAY AND SUNDAY NOW. YAY SPAIN. And yay for completely new champions in World Cup history! I actually don't care who wins at this point because I like Holland too. It's nice to be invested, but not completely invested.

In other news, Erin has moved in to the apartment above me! I helped her pack and move her suitcases up and down the stairs yesterday. It made me realize that I'm in desperate need of some spring cleaning, as soon as this next dissertation section is done, because I have accumulated random things that I really don't need. But in any case, now we can having cooking parties and other things, which will be lovely.

I also have a new housemate named Betty, who apparently just finished up her program but is waiting to move somewhere else. She's also Chinese, so now we have an all-Chinese household except for me. What precisely is residential administration trying to tell me? But anyway, she seems perfectly nice, so hopefully the flat will continue to be harmonious.

And to just keep with the completely fragmentary nature of this post, I just made some extremely delicious risotto. Okay, off to dinner and writing for me!

Conferences, Dinners and Dissertations

The week of madness is over! And it was quite a success.

Tuesday's conference was definitely the more formal of the two, and a lot of fun because of the interdisciplinary angle it was going for. Everyone was a bit limited in terms of material since we had to impart more basic information than usual to get everyone on the same page, but nonetheless I learned a lot of random and interesting things about topics ranging from WWII salvage to Roman coin propaganda. My own paper went over quite well, I think, and I didn't make a complete fool of myself trying to answer questions, so altogether everything went smoothly. It was a really fun group of people as well, so conversation was excellent and we all went out to dinner afterward. Good times!

As it happens, I noticed (and have been talking to Erin about) how interdisciplinarity seems like a relatively new thing over here, at least from a teaching angle, which I find really interesting. It's making me glad that I did my undergrad in the States, because I get the sense that had I done it over here I would have a much narrower range of knowledge to draw from. So perhaps I did my academic Pond-hopping in the right order after all. It's nice to be able to whip out my random postmodernism and religious studies knowledge when I need it.

Thursday's conference was less formal, but definitely a bit more technical at times given that we were all coming from a literature background. There was definitely some stuff that was totally out of my comfort zone, but nonetheless really fascinating. I was glad to be able to talk to everyone about their work afterward to get some further insight. And again--really awesome group of people, and the day went very smoothly which means really good things for the future of the conference. This is the first time the MA students have put together an event like this, so I think we really impressed the faculty with our organization and enthusiasm.

The next day of course I had my meeting with my advisor, where I got some really helpful feedback on my first section. Basically the main issues I'm having is with style rather than content--I tend to go a bit artsy rather than accurate with my organizational and linguistic choices, so I need to break that habit and really just focus on being straightforward and exact. On the plus side, though, my professor said that my ideas and content are sound, which I suppose is the more important thing in the end. I'm going to try to get my next section done before our last meeting, which can't happen past 12 July, so after taking this weekend off and being a slug I'm going to try to put myself on a fairly rigorous research schedule. We'll see how that (read: my self-discipline), works out.

So all in all, the craziness of the past month or so have paid off quite spectacularly, and I look forward to just concentrating on my one topic now. Oh right, and looking for apartments and jobs in Durham. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow your spirit, and upon this charge...

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

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

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

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

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

...I am such an Anglophile.

I need a haircut.

Apparently my hair loves England. I swear, it's grown about two inches in the past three weeks. It's ridiculous.

I had a meeting with my advisor on Friday, which was quite successful, I think. The 2000 words of dissertation I had written were basically a lot of beginnings, so most of the criticism he had for the work was along the lines of, 'This needs greater specificity, but obviously you're going to do that later because you haven't finished this section yet,' so as it stands I think I'm in fairly good shape. I indicated that hopefully I'll finish the first main section in a month or so, which he seemed more than happy with. It'll also give me something to present at the MA conference, so hooray. This does mean, however, that I really need to finish reading Carlyle, and he is very hard to pull apart. One of the things I like about the Victorian era was how blended political thought was with poetry and science and everything else, but it also makes for very difficult reading at times, especially with authors like him. But anyway, at least on the other hand I've already read through Hard Times, which is hardly a slog, so I'm halfway done in that sense.

I also got left to my own devices this week at the language program, which was a little dicey as the guy running the program basically dumped a huge pile of worksheets in front of me and said, 'Look through these and do some of them! It'll be great!' and I had to teach myself what was going on with them at the same time as I was foisting them on the students, which was really awkward. Worksheets, while useful for the basics, are better as homework it seems, but even then it can be hard to explain (and me to actually figure out!) what precisely the directions are to them. Eventually one of the Polish guys, whose English was a bit better than the others', suggested we just read articles and discuss them while going over vocabulary and such, which worked a lot better for all involved once I was actually able to track down some articles to work with. So for next time, which will be in a couple of weeks, I'll be finding some readings to do instead of worksheets.

Lastly, Erin and I might try to do a quick day trip on Tuesday out to East Riddlesdale Hall, which is an estate in Keighley. It looks pretty and easy to go through, and there's a ruined abbey nearby that looks absolutely gorgeous, so if I can figure out travel to it, we can put our National Trust subscriptions to good use. We shall see!

I really like dramatic titling.

I have officially declared my dissertation title! It shall be called:

'Demons of Industry: Machines as Monster and Metaphor in the Victorian Gothic'

Exciting, yes? Hopefully the content will be as exciting as the title. We shall see. I'm going to try to get another 2000 words done before Venice happens, because then I'll be a little less than a third of the way through, and that would be extremely excellent.

The last of my unassessed work has been turned in, so I'm feeling a little burned out at the moment--writing an essay a week for three weeks in a row is tiring, so I'm glad it's over. On the flip side though, I'm reading War of the Worlds for Imperial Masculinities this week, and it is lots of fun! I think I'm going to write my final essay for that course on it and Sherlock Holmes, as a sort of compare/contrast piece about detection and imperialism. It will be fun times, hopefully. I also read Byron for Monday's seminar, and while I definitely enjoyed it he is very dense, and I am bad at reading Romantic poetry, so it was a bit of a struggle. He was at least significantly more accessible than Blake, for which I am thankful.

On the application front, I have one more scholarship form to fill out, and then I am done. It will be glorious. It will probably be another few weeks before I start getting any responses back, so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.

And now, I'm off to a piano lesson. The Ballade is getting better! I'm amazed. Yay for having technical skills actually start to catch up with my interpretive skills. Took me long enough.

Procrastiduction! The neologism of my life.

Argh, procrastiductiveness has struck again. In other words, I have done my laundry, cleaned my room, done the dishes, and organized my shelves. I have not, however, made much progress on the actual writing of dissertation stuff. Rar. It'll get done...just not right now. So clearly, I'm going to write a blog post now, instead of doing anything about it.

On the other hand, I am taking initiative in other aspects of academia--I'm going to try to submit an abstract for an arts conference the Classics department is holding in a few months, because it will be small scale and the theme is "Transitions", which is totally what my dissertation is about. It looks like an appealing way of easing my way into the conference experience, and I know that Erin's attending, so I won't be alone. I've also volunteered to help organize and advertise an exclusively MA students' conference that a girl in my Imperial Masculinities seminar is coordinating, and I may present some material there as well. So that should be fun, and it will motivate me to work on really honing my research and presentation skills. Plus, I'll have some more things to put on my resume.

Other than that, things are still going well--the weather's being quite agreeable, actually, which is bizarre. Today was practically temperate. I can feel myself already becoming spoiled with less-than-frigid winters. I haven't had to wear my winter coat these past couple of days. It's sort of awesome.

Also, I bought a second pillow, and now I sleep a lot better. I had no idea this was an issue, but clearly I am bad at paying attention to what my body thinks of things. So hooray, I suppose.

Okay, I should really actually work now. For real. Yes.

ETA: I just heard back from the coordinator at the church that hosts English classes for immigrants and others in Leeds, and it looks like I'm on board for volunteer teaching on Saturdays! This shall be very interesting, considering I have no language teaching experience. But I have high hopes.

And We Are Back in the Swing of Things.

Busy-ness abounds! Classes are going well so far, in part because we take breaks halfway through each to have tea and biscuits. It's very English, and I like it, especially when I haven't gotten a chance to eat lunch. Anyway, my Nation and Empire course is turning out quite well, despite being centered on the Romantic period. There are only five of us in the class, but it's a good mix of people from different disciplines, so we're getting some good discussion in, and have a friendly rapport with each other. The professor's a fairly young guy who's good at leading discussion even when we're all scratching our heads over Coleridge, so all in all I think the course will go well.

My other course is Imperial Masculinities, which will be a challenge on the one hand, but quite fun on the other, because I get the sense that the professor is demanding, but the novels we're reading are basically the adventure books of my youth. I get to do a presentation on The Sign of Four! How cool is that? This week we're reading Allan Quartermaine, and we'll be covering Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, and yeah, basically all of my favorite books from when I was twelve and devouring books like woah.

I'm also realizing that the way I have my semester set up, I've covered the Victorians proper, and am now studying the era's bookends--Romantics from 1790-1830, approximately, and Victorian fin-de-siecle. Which is leading me very nicely into my tentative PhD proposal, bwahaha. I've done some preliminary digging, and it appears that there are no definitive works on the Gothic and the Industrial Revolution...yet. And thus, with any luck that's what I'd like to write on. I think (so far) that the topic is sound, and as a bonus I'll be able to incorporate my MA dissertation into it--given how my focus this year is on how the Gothic changed in response to industry from the Romantic period to the middle of the Victorian era, I can widen that scope to include the very beginnings of the first Industrial Revolution, all the way up to the fin-de-siecle and the transition into Modernism. It's a very broad time frame, I realize, but given that the thesis will amount to 100,000-150,000 words, and the genre and historical event are fairly specific, I think I'll be able to swing it, at least as a preliminary topic. We'll see how it goes.

Last week, I also had a meeting with my dissertation advisor, Dr. Salmon, which went very well. Dr. Salmon seemed very taken with my topic; we discussed how it was coming along, and I was able to further specify where I'm going with it, so I'll be writing a piece of my introduction and a close analysis of one of my main sources for Easter break. I've not decided which novel I'm going to start with, but hopefully writing will commence in the next couple of weeks.

On a more personal note, my flat's dinner was a resounding success, in part due to the presence of three of Federica's friends from Italy. We had Chinese soup, spring rolls, and rice, along with spaghetti with bacon, egg and cheese, and finally apple pie. It was extremely filling, but we spread it out over the course of the whole evening, and by the end, Alma broke out her guitar, and we had a regular soiree. The Chinese girls sang their national anthem and a couple of traditional songs, the Italians broke out dance and folk music, and I threw in some Fiona Apple and then tried to remember a song I'd written aeons ago, to moderate success, considering my woefully inadequate guitar skills. First time I've sung solo for an audience in years! But it was really fun. We're going to try and do something similar every fortnight or so. So hurrah for Federica, getting us to actually be social! And hurrah for music, the universal language of awesome.

I'm also under orders to teach everyone how to bake pie now. I'm okay with this plan.

Meetings and Thoughts

I think one of the things I love about England is the immediacy of the past. Today I went on the BBC website and one of the first boxes that pop up on the site is how to make a 'Victorian Christmas'. Obviously I'm a sucker for anything Victorian at this point, but the fact remains that history is a part of the everyday consciousness in a way that I just don't see in the US. Anyway. Did you know that Christmas cards were invented in Victorian Britain? FYI. Fun times with the BBC is what's on the agenda for me tonight, apparently.

Had my meeting with Richard Salmon today, and he seems like a really nice and easygoing guy. From what I've heard (hilariously, through my very gossipy seminar buddies) he doesn't really care for loud people, so we both sort of murmured our way through the meeting quite comfortably. He seemed to like my topic a lot, and we briefly discussed what sort of primary sources I'd like to concentrate on, and it looks like narrowing those down will be my main task for the winter break. I've amassed a lot of secondary reading so far, so as of now, I'll be starting off by checking out Samuel Butler's utopian satire Erewhon, which I had never heard of until my Brontes professor mentioned it to me the other day, but apparently has lots to say about machinery and it's potential uncanniness. So that's a start, and it's not even Dickens! Although Hard Times might be making an appearance too. Good thing I actually read that on my own a while ago. So overall, I'm apparently not in bad shape. Win! I have a limit of six hours total meeting time with Dr. Salmon, so hopefully by the time I get back on campus, I'll be able to use that time wisely.

And now, classes are officially done! I sort of don't know what to do with myself, except that I totally do have things that need to be done. They're just schedule-less, which is rather disconcerting. But with any luck/proper work ethic, I'll be able to make dent in the next few days before break in the essays I'll be needing to finish for January. This has all gone down way too fast holy crap.

Grammar rant, ahoy!

Last week of classes! I'm reading Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, and Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, which looks like a ton of fun. Apparently he wrote it on a bet with his brother that he could write a better book than Treasure Island. I don't know whether he succeeds or not yet, but I am always up for adventure novels a la Stevenson.

I've also set up a meeting with Dr. Salmon on Friday, which I have to prepare for, so there's much reading to do this week. I also ought to decide what my final paper for my Victorian module should be on--I'm leaning towards A Tale of Two Cities, but it might also be useful to look at the working class poetry in relation to Marx. The latter could probably serve as some preliminary research towards my dissertation, so perhaps I should do that. Then again, there are elements to A Tale of Two Cities that could also be mined for dissertation stuff, so...I'm torn. Time to go and download some critical articles or something.

In other news, I ended up having to help Erin grade some freshman papers because some of her fellow classics scholars bailed on her, and all I have to say is: Who is teaching these people before they get here?? The lack of grammatical coherence in a frightening number of those papers was just reprehensible. With some I couldn't even tell what they were trying to say enough to know what was wrong with it. And just to check that I wasn't being overly judgmental, I went home straight after and reread some of my essays from high school, and while that was a fairly shaming experience, I definitely could at least structure my thoughts more coherently at that point than what I was reading from Erin's kids. Run-on sentences, lack of basic things like apostrophes and even a semblance of effort towards proper citation...I could go on. It was rather distressing, to say the least. I think I liked maybe three out of the ten or so I ended up grading.

Luckily, while I felt like screaming by the time we were done, I also had an overwhelming urge to become a tutor just to prevent these types of things from happening. So, I guess I'm entering into the right profession. Man, I really didn't think I was much of a grammar nazi, because I know I make lots of mistakes myself and do grammar entirely by ear and not by rule. And I'm definitely not picky when it comes to proper formatting and bibliographies, because I know just as everyone else does that getting those things right is a pain, but...jeez. It was out of control. Be prepared to endure further yelling when you actually see me in person.

Sorted!

I have a dissertation adviser! His name is Dr. Richard Salmon, and was actually the person I first emailed about my topic, which I'm taking as a good omen, particularly since his interests, as stated on the web, were the most closely related to my own out of the faculty. I've only seen him briefly in lecture, but he reminds me a bit of Tom Sauer in his manner, which would be fantastic, really. Hopefully we'll be able to create a good working relationship, particularly since I have him for both coming semesters while some other people are switching it up. Anyway, I'll be meeting him some time before break, so we'll see how it goes! Also, I need to do more reading for that. Yeah, I'll go and do that, then.

Dissertation: Consider yourself proposed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woo I'm twenty-two...

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

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

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

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

Thanksgiving!

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

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

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

A very Gothic day!

Today started off a little hectic and ended up quite fun! I stayed up absurdly late last night because my brain refused to turn off, which was quite frustrating. On the other hand, the issue which my brain couldn't leave alone happened to be my dissertation topic, so in a way, it was a bit useful. I may be drifting a bit from my original idea, which was to frame a year of literature in the context of scientific or religious debate. Firstly, that's an incredibly broad topic, and secondly I'm finding it a bit uninspiring and a bit unfocused. So I'm leaning back towards an old love of mine which I had previously dismissed as too sensational: The Gothic. Granted, the Gothic of the 18th century is overwrought and a bit ridiculous, but I had been under the impression that it died out a bit once the Victorians came along. It didn't, of course, which I should have known given the dark and misty moors of Wuthering Heights and such. What's interesting to me, however, is how it changed in the Victorian period. Industry had effect on its character--the sublime could now be found in the steam engine, as well as the cliffs of Moher, and darkness was in the heart of London. Imperialism had its contributions to make as well. So I'm finding myself quite taken with the idea of studying this new Gothic. I'll have to email some people to find out whether it's viable. Also, what texts I should be using to focus the argument. Anyway, this is all the product of an overactive brain at 4:00 in the morning, so who knows whether it will actually work.

What this all adds up to is that I had to finish some reading this morning before seminar and then proceeded to oversleep a bit, so there was some manic balancing of breakfast and books. We read some poems from the anthology, The Poorhouse Fugitives, which seeks to compile works by self-taught and working class writers of the early 19th century. Some were clearly meant to be considered not as artistic works, but as political ones, while others took the artistic side seriously in addition to trying to get a point across. We focused mainly on the Chartists as a complement to Sybil, and while I can't say I was particularly taken with the verses, the varying agendas of the working class during the time was quite interesting. Some nice examples of the sublime in industry too, which I may need to take a second look at, considering my new dissertation thoughts.

The theme of the Gothic continued when I met up with Marta after class, and after wandering around a bit and grabbing some coffee, we saw the new adaptation of Dorian Gray. First of all, movie screens are vast here. It's quite a treat. As for the movie, it was not as bad as I expected it to be, but I had set the bar quite low, so take that as you will. The acting was acceptable, but the decadence was a bit overwrought, and they changed the last third of the movie almost completely, which was sort of inevitable given the brevity of the original work, but left me nonplussed. Hopefully Wilde won't have to roll over in his grave too many times. It was a nice ending to the evening, in any case. I have the urge to read some Poe now.