long-overdue updaaaate

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

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

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

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

my schedule is now filled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Trip to Bern/Communing with the Shelleys in the Alps

More photos! This time with decidedly less imminent rain.

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

Playing Rachmaninoff in the Tate

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am very relieved,

...as the AHRC project has now come to fruition, and it went really well! The exhibition on Lord Armstrong was launched on Tuesday and then began officially at Jesmond Dene on Thursday, and all of the participants did a fantastic job putting it together. And now I can take a deep breath and not have to worry about organising or supervising anything for a while. I hadn't realised how much low-level anxiety I'd been carrying around just worrying about whether I was forgetting something or not getting back to someone or whatever else. But now it is done! Huzzah. When I got home from the launch I slept for about 13 hours nonstop. It was good.

So now, I'm singing at Doncaster Minster this weekend to help out a friend's parish choir, which should be good fun, but other than that, it's Goethe all day, every day. It's been a long time since I worked on him, so a lot of it is reacquainting myself with my old research and then trying to adapt it to what I'm now trying to argue, which is slow going, but hopefully I'll be able to get through the whole chapter soon without too many hangups.

To be honest, my struggle at this point has been mostly getting over the fact that was really hot out this past week and all I've wanted to do is lie outside with a margarita or something and work on my tan. It's cooled down a bit this weekend, so maybe I will be more motivated. But on the whole, let's face it--my life is not hard. Plus, I have a couple short trips to look forward to--I'm going down to London in August to visit a friend and see the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A, and then a couple weeks after that I'm going up to Edinburgh to meet up with a college friend and catch up. So if I can time my editing in between those things, it would be ideal. We'll see if I can manage it!

Traveling, far and near

I have returned from choir tour in Paris! It was very fun. We sang to Napoleon in the chapel where he's buried in the Ecolé Militaire, and did a concert in the Irish Chaplaincy. Additionally, we managed to get in last-minute singing in a massive and beautiful church near the chaplaincy, and then sang a service at Saint Eustache, which is even more massive and beautiful. It was a little mind-blowing, and very odd, just because when the space is so tall and expansive your voice tends to spin up towards the ceiling and never come back down so that it sounds like you're the only one there. Disconcerting, at best. But still amazing.

Also, I gorged myself on French pastries and cocktails, so it was a lovely vacation altogether.

The day after I came back from Paris, I went on a trip to Cragside for my public engagement project, which was also very fun! Lord Armstrong was a bit mad, and as a result, his house is amazing, filled to the brim with gadgets and hydroelectric-powered machinery. We took a tour around and checked out his various acquisitions (everything from paintings to Moorish tiles to taxidermy), as well as a fireplace so massive it had to be built into the mountainside to avoid collapsing the house. He was a man before his time--knew sustainable energy when he saw it. The whole place was incredible, and very fun to have a wander in.

This has of course all distracted me from work, but in a good way, I think. I'm feeling refreshed on the whole, and ready to have a summer full of labour. This will no doubt change as soon as I actually get back to work, but the feeling is helpful for now.

We have been granted!

I'm very pleased to announce that a bid for an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) grant that my friends/colleagues Nicole and Bea and I wrote up has been approved! As such, we'll be organising and running a training programme focussed on archival research into Sir William Armstrong and his role as a scientist and philanthropist in the Victorian northeast this coming spring. It's going to be a big project, and we've got a fair chunk of change to do it, and I'm quite excited about the prospect of making it happen. If it comes off well, it will be a big feather in all our caps.

Durham was totally flooded the other week when we had torrential rain for a few days, and as such two of the central academic buildings in town, both of which are usually occupied by the departments I work for, have been shut down, because someone had the bright idea of keeping all of the electrical workings in the basement, so as soon as the river climbed a few feet higher than usual, all of it got ruined. As such, I taught one of my classes all the way across town, and I had to retrieve a whole bunch of my books from the postgrad study room before everyone was shut out of the building entirely. Also, my advisor is now in exile from his office. It's all rather inconvenient. We can only be thankful, I suppose, that it occurred so close to the end of term, so that they have time to fix everything over the holiday.

In any case, the term is winding down or up, depending on how you look at it--I just finished with my last teaching session, and soon it will be time to mark essays madly and have a marathon session of handing them back and meeting with all my students, and as previously stated, do a lot of choir. Also I should probably get more mundane things done, like cleaning and laundry and errands, but those are secondary at the moment. Oh right, and I should fit some research in there as well, that would be good. There is a vague feeling of hectic-ness in the air, and it is very distracting. On the whole, I am tired.

But! I have a direction for my last thesis chapter, and a lot of books to read for it, and an idea of how to go about doing a big chronological overhaul of all of my chapters so that they begin to cohere to each other, as well as internally. So that's good. I was in a coffee shop today between class and choir and managed to write a good page of introductory material that better articulates what it is exactly that I'm trying to do and why I should bother to do so, which is encouraging. As always, I fear that I am better at pontificating than analysing, but sometimes some free pontification is very helpful for clarifying my thoughts, which can then be used more analytically. Or something.

All in all though, I am looking forward to Christmas! I require reading by the fire, pianos that are not keyboards, and kitties. Not necessarily in that order.

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.

London, Take One: the fun trip

I am returned from a lovely jaunt to London to meet up with Hannah, who was swinging back west after a family trip to Amsterdam and had time to stop over and see some theatre and have a wander with me. We had an awesome time being non-obnoxious tourists, walking to and fro around central London, drinking coffee, and generally catching up.

London behaved itself in terms of weather, and as we walked we saw the telltale signs of everyone gearing up for the Paralympics, which is pretty cool.

New logo for Tower Bridge!

We went to the Tate Modern and and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the latter of which is officially my favourite museum ever because they have everything from historical costume to Islamic art to ironwork and other decorative arts, and basically it's everything I want in a museum all at once. Also, this time around they had a bunch of chairs in the entrance and out in the courtyard, which bore a very specific design element--they had conical bases!

(Not shown: much giddy laughter and trying to balance upside down while making silly noises.)

We ended up just hanging out in the V&A's garden for a couple of hours, just because the chairs were, in addition to being extremely fun to faff about in, extremely comfortable. It was a good time.

In addition, we went and saw a spectacular production of Sweeney Todd, and a fun production of Singin' in the Rain, which prompted me to watch the movie as soon as I got home. But more than anything, we just walked around, seeing stuff. We hit Baker Street, Fleet Street, Downing Street, saw Buckingham Palace and a very unhappy changing of the guard that started in sunshine and finished in the rain, and wandered around Hyde Park for quite a while. We also walked a good deal of the south bank of the Thames, which neither of us had seen, which was quite lovely.

Most importantly, however, we hit my personal favourite road, which is of course:

Land of the spectacular tailoring. We drooled at many suits in the windows, and were thoroughly intimidated by the people inside the shops who looked so at home amidst so much mahogany and chalked fabric. Ah, the magic of bespoke. 

Anyway, it was a lovely time! I think I finally have a better sense of the overall geography of London, which is definitely something that has eluded me for a long while. So hopefully when I go back on Monday for my intellectual history program I won't get lost. 

Huzzah work and money!

I'm teaching this coming year! Just two sessions of Introduction to the Novel, and nothing at the secondary level, but it's more than this past year, so I'm happy enough. Now, fingers remained crossed about the combined honours position, and I'll be set.

I also got some money from my department to do the UCL-Sussex class in London, so that's good too. I had to buy a book that's going to be round-tabled or something during one of the sessions, and it's all about stoicism through history, which hopefully will be interesting--I'm not used to having to buy books at full price because they're so new, grrr.

Also on the reading front, I've extracted several non-academic books from my bookshelf that I simply haven't gotten around to reading yet, with the hope that having them on my nightstand will make me read them. First on the pile is Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, which is amazing so far, but not exactly light reading. I may have to intersperse it with something silly, but I fear I've read most of my really silly books, and am now only left with substantial things. Maybe I'll take a weekend and power through a bunch of them. I will edify myself by force! And then maybe traumatise myself immediately afterwards by finishing House of Leaves. Good times.

That's all the news for now! I am reading about Marx getting into drunken fights with Prussian aristocrats and writing bad poetry. It is a good time!

Haircut!

I think she lopped off about four or five inches. My head feels lighter!

It rained hard enough to set off a car alarm. And, you know, flood Newcastle.

It has rained torrentially and dramatically this past week, which was only made acceptable by the fact that I was basically married to my laptop the entire time, hashing out a draft of my Frankenstein chapter. The good news is, though, that both the chapter, and the rainstorms, appear to be done now! I say 'appear' only because the sky continues to look somewhat ominous, but it's been doing that all day, and it's been most pleasant anyway. Crossed fingers that it clears completely, at least for a few days. The chapter on the other hand is definitely done, at least until I need to edit it. But that won't be for a while.

In other good news, Durham's confirmed that they're giving NENC the whole £500 for our 'Moving Towards Science' Symposium, so we are now firmly in the green for funding that, and can offer free registration and travel bursaries besides. Very exciting! We've released a call for papers, so hopefully we'll hear from a good number of people with interesting paper proposals.

Now my only priorities before I head back to Rome are a job application for the combined honours course, and a short article on Marx which I'm going to workshop through one of Durham's training courses, which will serve as the beginning of a paper I'm going to present at NENC's speaker series in August. It'll be a good way of getting back into the rhythm of Marx, because I think that's the chapter that I'm going to begin really overhauling this summer so that it fits properly with my Faust and Frankenstein chapters.

Also, I'm getting a haircut tomorrow. I think I'm going to go fairly short, because I seem to only get haircuts about twice a year nowadays, and at the moment it's overly heavy and needing to be braided and stuff, and that's annoying. I'll post pictures after the fact! Unless it's hideous, but hopefully it won't be.

Post of procrastination!

These are becoming tellingly common. Anyway. Random things have happened this past week and a half! Let me round them up.

First, I have to share a weird thing: so given that I was ill for most of the choir tour, I had an oddly limited range that was mostly ridiculously low or high and breathy--no normal, middle range at all. Well, now I'm feeling better, and miraculously I seem to have...discovered my head voice? I don't even know, but I feel like I've unlocked a level on a video game, and now all of a sudden I can reach high Fs and stuff. It's crazy! Not the prettiest sound yet, but in tune and not entirely offensive, and it doesn't feel like I'm forcing it or anything. I can't explain it. Hopefully it won't suddenly disappear again. I don't trust it yet.

I'm working on my Shelley chapter as diligently as I can, which is going okay, though I'm not sure whether it will be done on time. No doubt it will hinge upon my ability to just hunker down and ignore all other things until it's finished, which may or may not happen, we will see. There are lots more interesting connections cropping up between Promethean myth and Faustian myth, between Goethe and Shelley, so I'm fairly confident that at the very least I'm not making up connections and arguments where none actually exist. The problem, as usual, is articulating all of these things in a meaningful way, which can only be accomplished, so far as I can tell, by pecking at a sentence or two, staring off into space for an hour, rinse, repeat.

Occasionally there is tea somewhere in there too. And sandwiches.

Beyond that, I went to a workshop last week on how the publishing world is faring (here's a hint: not well) and how best to deal with it as an academic, and received the comforting news that while the market is terrible and the competition fierce, my style of research--aka, big and sprawling--is far more appealing to publishers than the narrower case studies which tend to be in vogue within thesis writing. So when I emerge, pale and blinking, from the bowels of my degree, I may actually stand a chance of getting an editor interested in my work. But of course, that is in the far distant future.

In the less distant future, I've been accepted at a four day summer school program on intellectual history run by UCL and Sussex, so I'll be taking a trip down to London for that in September, which is exciting. Hopefully I'll be able to get money from my department to pay for it, or if not, somewhere else. I'm also applying for a second teaching position out of the School for Combined Honours, which is basically a liberal arts degree some Durham students can apply for, rather than the usual UK specialisation scheme. Their one required course is the one I'd be teaching on, and basically is designed to foster critical thinking and self-reflection in first year students. If by some great good fortune I manage to get a position doing that as well as teaching within my department, I could actually pay for my rent through teaching alone! That would be nice.

In less businesslike news, I went to a friend's birthday party the other day and had excellent drinks and burgers with lots of fun and lovely people, and then had a very entertaining time getting back the next day because all of the trains south were delayed due to...wayward cows. Apparently the farmer had to be informed that exactly nineteen cows had gotten free and were loitering around the track, like you do. The droll announcement of this over the tannoy more than made up for the delay, in my opinion. Also, there was a very small child on the train who, unlike the rest of his family, who were dressed like normal weekenders, was done up in tweed and was earnestly asking various passengers, "Excuse me sir/madame, does this train go to Derby?" which was basically the most adorable, ridiculous and English thing I have ever seen in my life. So yes, train travel--it's a fun time. Far more fun than planes.

The rest of the week will no doubt be far less interesting than all this, because it is just writing, writing, writing, 'til this chapter is done. Fingers crossed that the words come easy.

Transforming Objects

So I am home from my adventure in conferencing, this one being far less stressful than the last, probably for a number of reasons that include the lack of travel stress, good friends being in and around the conference, and a very congenial bunch of delegates.

My paper was on one of the first panels, so I got it out of the way early on, and then I chaired a panel the next day, which was entirely new to me but very fun. My own paper went well, I think, though I tripped over the words a bit because I hadn't read the whole thing aloud end-to-end before, just in bits and pieces, but on the whole people seemed to like it. I had a great discussion with one of the other panelists who is working on a different aspect of the same general subject, so in that regard it was very fruitful. Chairing was good also, all on the life of paper and the physical engagement with it from a processing point of view, and in the market place. I was very pleased to come across someone else who liked the magical way in which Marx wrote about the economy as much as I do!

On the whole, while I wasn't very familiar with a lot of object research that's happening at present, the perspective on it which was presented at the conference on the whole was really fascinating, and a good alternative look at the era I'm researching. Also, I'm now convinced that I need to learn how to give papers without a full script, because one of the keynote speakers did his full hour with nothing but a powerpoint (which didn't include any prompts or bullet points) to help him along, and it was very impressive and engaging. So that'll be my next project. I'm probably going to try it with NENC, since we're doing a speaker series this summer and I'm presenting something in the August session. It'll be an adventure in not being frazzled!

To look at the schedule of the other papers, and the general gist of the conference at large, go here.

Now, I must get back to Shelley and write up my chapter this month, eek!

A Monstrous Conference!

Or rather, a conference about monstrosity.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Ta for now!

Caaaake

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

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

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

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

Things that have happened

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://xkcd.com/

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

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.