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?

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.

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. 

The new year, it is afoot

Back from the countryside for good this time, and it is back to the grindstone. I am finalising all of my schedules and things and filling up my calendar with them, and the result is a very cluttered calendar indeed. Manageable, but a far cry from the summer, at least.

It is officially Freshers Week, which means that classes haven't started or anything, but there are lots of activities and things that new students can mill around and sign up for. The only way this effects me is that today a lot of Taylor Swift was being blared from a laptop in the hallway outside the study room while the rugby team tried to recruit new members, and as a result I now have 'We're never ever getting back together' stuck in my head on loop, which is not appreciated. Also, the centre of town is about 4x more crowded than before, which is kind of nice, with the exception of lots of people trying to hand me flyers about things.

In other news, I have finally made a dent into my chapter progress to the point where the end is maybe in sight, though I doubt I'll be happy with the finished product until I have yet another go at it some time in the next year. As long as I can get all the necessary arguments and information down for now, elegance aside, I'll be happy. Maybe even by the end of this week! Fingers crossed. I am going to a party on Saturday, so if it can be done by then, that would be ace.

For some reason, my room looks a lot neater than usual. I suspect it's due to my finally getting around to returning about ten books to the library that I've had for months on end, cluttering up my desk and shelves. Also, I put all of my summer dresses away, because it is definitely autumn now, it is cold, it is time to bring out the jackets and boots. Brr.

Lastly, I have found scarlet lipstick that a) looks good and b) stays on all day and it is making me extremely happy. I am one step closer to being retro-cool! Maybe.

In which I embrace country living

Or perhaps more accurately, poke it inquiringly with a stick.

I'm house and dog-sitting for one of the college tutors at St. Chad's, which means that I'm staying in her cottage in Bishop Auckland, a mile outside of town, surrounded by farmland and Roman archaeological sites. I am accompanied only by a very old German shepherd and a giant bumbling mastiff.

It's pretty great, not gonna lie. Highlights have included:

• Getting up close and personal with a squirrel that was stealing dog food out of the shed
• Talking to fellow dogwalkers who I can only half-understand because man, are the accents thick out here
• Finding a giant spider in the sink first thing in the morning and shrieking like a damsel in distress
• Actually learning how the bus system works 
• Listening intensely to Radio 3 since there's a radio in the kitchen, which means everything from my favourite Brahms piano quintet to a John Cage celebration at the Edinburgh festival to excerpts from Dr. Faustus and Richard III and various others accompanied by Black Sabbath and Liszt. Seriously awesome programming that I was not previously aware of. 
• Fresh baked bread, because there is a bread maker so I don't have to actually do any work to make it.
• And the very best, chatting with people camped out on the Roman fort area outside the house who are dressed as Romans for some sort of yearly get-together and re-enactment. Yes, I am totes serious. They had shields! And capes! And some of them drove up from Manchester just to hang out and entertain children! Awesome.

Also, have a spam of pictures taken while walking the dogs:

Dweeg no. 1

Dweeg no. 2

Archaeology! aka Binchester Roman Fort, approximately 30 seconds away from the house. There's a more cleared up bit over to the right, but you have to go through the mini-museum to get to it proper.

Sheep! Also 30 seconds away, and Suzie (the shepherd) likes to fantasize about chasing them.

Auckland castle! I haven't figured out how to get there yet, but it's very close, and technically owns all the grounds from it to the fort, so we're technically neighbours.

Pretty fields. Usually there are pinto ponies grazing there, it's very picturesque.

Speaking of picturesque...

Following the same wall...

...up to a badass Victorian bridge! Man, I love these things.

FAVOURITE KIND OF LANDSCAPE.

I will take pictures with an actual camera next time I'm there, seeing as I'm doing more housesitting at the end of September after I get back from London. These are all ipod photos, so apologies for the crappy quality. 

So yes, now I'm off to London to meet up with Hannah and tool around being touristy, then back to Durham, then back to London again to do intellectual history summer school, then back to Durham again, and then it's time for the NENC Symposium! And then back to housesitting, and then teacher training for the coming academic year.

Phew. This summer has been way busier than expected. But I can't say that I mind. I am much better at being productive if I have more things to do.

Tanned and now ready to do work

I had a wonderful, wonderful time in Rome again with my dear grandma talking books and academia and family and friends while jaunting around trying (and sometimes failing) to find basilicas and museums and soaking up the sun. As it turns out, really good maps of Rome are in short supply, because we had a truly farcical time finding some of these things! Still, it was nice to wander about, despite the fierce summer weather.

Also, architecture:

Behold, my future home.

It was extremely busy, being the height of tourist season, so we didn't get into all of the things we wanted to, but it was still a very fun time, and we got to check out some beautiful buildings, excellent art, and even some Vatican archival documents that were on display at the Capitoline Museum. All in all, a very lovely trip.

And now, it is back to work for me--I have to apply for funding for my intellectual history workshop in London, and also prepare my paper for the NENC speaker series, which I'll be presenting at in August. Also, I have to peer review some papers for a Durham workshop, and of course overhaul my Marx chapter. So I am busy!

But on the other hand, I just got informed that I've been shortlisted for teaching in Combined Honours, so fingers crossed that they take me. Also, on the suggestion of my friend Bea, I have learned how to make chai tea from scratch, and now I can't stop, I'm going to start living off of iced chai lattes, oh man are they delicious.

That's all the news for now, toodles!

Goethe chapter is conquered!

That is, it is finished insofar as I can't look at it anymore without my brain hurting, and it has both an introduction and a conclusion in addition to all of the major things that I wanted to say smooshed in between. So I am well pleased, all told, and celebrating mostly by doing all of my laundry, sleeping a lot, and staring at my suddenly very empty calendar.

Choir has ended for the term, and I have picked up all but two of my students' essays (I will check my mailbox again for the last two, and if they are not there then I'm going to have to start haranguing by email), and thus my only responsibility for the next few weeks is some grading. I'm thinking I should maybe take a day trip somewhere interesting so that I can claim to have had a proper vacation over Easter. I haven't done any research into the possibility, but I'm willing to take a train somewhere and wander about at some point. In the interim, I have a new Temeraire book, The Hunger Games, and about the fifth copy of one of my favorite Dick Francis novels all downloaded onto my kindle, so I'm going to do some fun reading for once, and hopefully I won't backslide into analyzing thematic content and political implications as I do so. If all else fails, I have one more issue of Transmetropolitan and the graphic novel version of The Vesuvius Club to completely divorce me from my research brain, at least for a short time.

I'll have a couple of things to work on once I'm done playing at vacation time. My proposal for the 'Transforming Objects' conference got accepted, so I'll be working on that this spring as well as starting reading on Frankenstein, and it sounds like there's going to be a really good line-up of speakers for the whole event. I am full of admiration for Nicole who seems to be doing a fantastic job coordinating everything and dealing with the headache that is answering the barrage of emails from all of the participants. I have certainly not reached a point at which I feel responsible enough to undertake something like that, so more power to her.

In the meantime, we are just on the cusp of spring, which means that I am torn between stalwartly wearing dresses and leaving my window open, and accepting the fact that it is just a little too chilly still for anything but hot tea and sweaters. It is also slightly frustrating that it is genuinely warm and fantastic for about three hours each day, but if you go out dressed for that and then stay out past that sweet spot you will find yourself with chattering teeth and goosebumps as the sun disappears from view. I have still not mastered the art of layering that will remedy this, but I'm working on it. I now have an impressive collection of scarves, so I need to learn how to tie them in lots of fun and debonair ways.

Lastly, I am slowly transforming my life with an ipod app, which is just about the most ridiculous statement I've ever made, but whatever. I've started using 'Clear', which is a friendly and intuitive list-making app that organizes and categorizes everything from my research tasks to my grocery list to my daily list of things to do, and considering how much I adore lists, it's basically everything I could ever want in life. The mere fact that I now walk into Tesco's and actually leave with everything I need (and nothing more!) is the best. Project: Not Failing At Life progresses!

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!

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.

Employment!

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

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

So.

I'm being entrusted with undergrads!

...Oh god.

Paris!

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

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

Notre Dame! And lots and lots of people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London!

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

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

Pure class.

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

This is me, in a desperate panic.

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

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

Also:

Obligatory goofy pose with Darwin!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Adult responsibility win!

I have a flat in Durham!

It's on one of the many hills in the city, about twenty minutes from the university, and it's quite lovely. The neighborhood, Gilesgate, is very quiet, at least insofar as I'm living away from the more student-populated section, and apparently I have cute retired neighbors who give us vegetables from their garden. The whole process couldn't have been easier, to be honest. The owners of the house are a really lovely couple who picked me up from the train station to see the house, were very reasonable and realistic about the costs, and generally seemed very easy to get along with. I think I'll be very happy as their tenant.

So far I know I'm living with an older PhD student from Northern Ireland, and a Saudi masters student. There's one more bedroom that's available as far as I know, but it may or may not be occupied by another American student who's been in contact. In any case, it seems like it should be a very harmonious house, so I'm pleased and relieved to know where I'm going.

In the meantime, I'm getting bribed with chocolate by my flatmate to proofread her dissertation. Delicious!

In which I am a corporate entity. But not really.

So I got bored and took a break from dissertation work to make an official website for myself. Very simple, but it's a nice central hub for everything. Apparently my gearhead graphic is now my personal logo. I think it suits me.

In other news, I'm going up to Durham next week to see an apartment that I have high hopes for! The landlady has been very nice in correspondence, and so far there's one other female postgrad living in the flat, so I'll be in good company, hopefully. Anyway, this is all of course hinging on whether I actually like the place when I get there, but it seems ideal from what I can see so far. I've also nailed down a letter of reference from one of my professors, so that's all set. It would be nice to know where I'm living in a month!

Holy god, I'm moving in a month. Well, five weeks.

Still. Yikes.

Also: Everyone go see Inception right now. I mean it. It is operatic and beautiful and my new favorite thing. It has its flaws, but it's also totally not as confusing as everyone makes out. The score is absolutely amazing. And there are multiple Escher references. I'm going to need to see it a second time. Possibly a third. But not before I finish my Marx section. Yes.

Life Decisions, Seminars, and Other General Mishaps

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone! Sorry I wasn't around family this year. I had seminar instead.

This semester has apparently gone by obscenely fast--I had my last Research Methods lecture last Monday, and it managed to send everyone into a complete panic. The focus of the lecture was basically a PhD information session, which I apparently have to think about now. There are deadlines for scholarships in January, along with some for PhD programs, so I have to start consulting people about my thesis proposal. Consider that my agenda for the coming week, since my reading load is a bit light for now. I'd like to apply to Leeds again, since I like it here, but I'll be looking at some other places as well. More generally though, I think I'd like to stay in the UK. It's been a rather wonderful few months so far, and I'm getting the sense that a single year is just not enough time for me to live here. So in addition to planning where I'm going to be in a year or so, I'll be looking at jobs accordingly, and accommodation. To be honest, accommodation is a bit more pressing, because while I don't necessarily have to start my PhD in the fall, I definitely do need a place to live. Argh. These things are not sorting themselves well in my brain yet. I am trying, though. A real estate catalog got pushed through everyone's mailboxes the other day, so if I end up staying in Leeds that's at least one place to start.

What's up with this being a real person deal? I so do not feel old enough to be dealing with apartment hunting and year-ahead planning.

Other news: I met with my Brontës professor about my essay, which basically confirmed the written feedback I'd gotten from her earlier. It was gratifying to hear that my writing style is up to the task of addressing all the complex ideas I want to convey, and we were in agreement over what needed to be changed and fleshed out. With twice as much space to work with this time around (the unassessed essay was limited to 2,000 words, the assessed version can be 4,000), I feel fairly confident that I can do the work required. Also, I apparently was channeling Edward Said through the whole thing, though on a less colonialist scale. So he'll be making an appearance in the next draft.

Additionally, I managed to do a presentation for this same seminar last Thursday, which went quite well considering I had to present about the Brontë's poetry, and I am terrible at poetry. Thank God for helpful critical articles. It's quite funny--I feel like the Brontës are often generally lumped together as one singular writing force, but when one reads not only their novels, but particularly their poetry, it's clear that this isn't the case at all. Branwell's the obvious outsider, seeing as he was male, a dissipated alcoholic, and never actually wrote a published novel. But more than that, he's adamantly Byronic, whereas his sisters took Byronic forms and then twisted and reformed them, often to a less Romantic aesthetic. Wordsworth made an appearance in their pieces, too. Emily is by far the most skilled poet, not afraid to embrace simplicity while Charlotte tended to overwork her verse. Meanwhile Anne was surprisingly compelling, but remained the most straightforwardly religious of the siblings. It seems to me that the only similarities that show are ones born of a shared upbringing; the rest is all quite different. That's not what I actually wrote about in my presentation--instead, I talked about functions of recollection versus remembrance and had a bizarre nervous attack while reading it to the class which was clearly stage fright not over my presenting to the class but presenting my writing to the class, and which turned out to be a completely unfounded anxiety as everyone really liked my writing style. Again. So nice to hear that even when I am not sure whether I'm making sense, I can at least get my intended points across fairly clearly and elegantly!

Finally, and on a much lighter note, der ist ein Weihnachtsmarkt at the Millennium Centre in Leeds! In other words, a German Christmas Market. Apparently they're very common in England as well as Germany, stemming from German immigrants bringing their traditions over a couple of centuries ago, or something like that. In any case, there's a large complex of stall shops set up in the plaza, selling crafts and gifts and German food and mulled wine, and it's all quite charming. Well, apart from the giant beer tent in the middle of it, topped with giant statues of ponies and men hauling barrels of ale. That's less charming, and more hilarious, but I suppose this is to be expected given, you know, it's a German market. In conclusion, I got all of my Christmas shopping done. Win!

This entry is overblown and overlong. I suppose that's what I get for not updating for over a week.

Life at Leeds, and other things

I realize that in these accounts I haven't actually given much space to daily life-type things, so I'm going to do that now, while it's on my mind.

I finally met my fourth flatmate, who is very friendly and studying graphic design and advertising. So hooray, another artistic type! She, like Summer and Fiona, hails from China, though she didn't say whereabouts. Anyway, nice to know someone's actually living in that last room. I was beginning to wonder. What has also become apparent is that I'm probably the least competent cook of the bunch, or simply don't plan ahead as much. Fiona and Summer make a habit of doing various soups every few days from scratch, and I'm pretty sure Yetande makes some awesome stewlike concoctions which she can freeze and reheat all the time. I'm very much a sandwich person--I've never really gotten used to making things in bulk. I'll have to work on that. I think the problem is that I never think of buying the basic ingredients and things when I'm at the store, so I never have the supplies. I'll amend that at some point, hopefully. If I don't continue to be absentminded about it. Food is not terribly expensive here if one sticks to raw ingredients, so I really have no excuse.

My locale is sort of wonderful, in that I'm not so far down the hill from campus that it feels like a trek, but I'm also far enough from the city centre for the atmosphere to be suburban, rather than urban. Also, since the apartment complex is in a ring shape, and my room faces outward, it's very quiet for me even when various revelry is going on in the middle recreation-type area. In the afternoons, at least a few people let their dogs run around on the field outside my window, which is fun to watch. Beyond the field is a panorama of the city, which is even better! There are also quite a few families in the apartments just outside the complex, so there are a lot of kids running around, in addition to students.

Other random thing: I love having a washbasin in my room! It's totally random, and yet makes complete sense. I can do my makeup and things without hogging the bathroom. I also love that there are actually bookshelves provided in my room. In general, despite the overenthusiastic installation of fire doors everywhere, accommodation is pretty sweet here. It seems consistently true as well, from what I've seen of the other dorms and complexes.

I think I've gotten the timing on getting to class down now, and it's not bad unless I have to go towards the science block. 15-25 minutes of walking will get me just about anywhere, I estimate, including down to the city centre. I can't say that I've been terribly adventurous in terms of moving beyond the parts of the city I know I can get back from, but I'm hoping that on some free days I can get someone to get on the bus with me to the other side of the city, along the river. I hear there are some killer restaurants over there, as well as some nightclubs that aren't as clogged with students as the ones on the main drag just beyond campus are.

On the academic side, I've devised a new note-taking system that's working out fairly well, and makes me feel weirdly official. The essentials store at the union sells these nice black notebooks that look like actual books, rather than spiral bound ones, with just the right amount of pages for a semester of both preliminary notes and topics during seminar. So I have one for each module. All handouts are paperclipped in. I don't think I've been so organized in ages. It's enabled by the uniformity of my subjects, but the written work's corresponding uniformity has, I think, made me more consistently productive.

Also helpful? I've gotten totally awesome at speed reading. I can do a 500 page novel in about a day, and now that I have my good note-taking system in place and write down all the themes and ideas I come across in a neat and consolidated place (and not in the margins--I can never find my work in the margins) I actually remember things to say in seminar. I probably should have come up with this system ages ago, but somehow I didn't. Maybe I'm finally getting over my slacker tendencies. I'm still a procrastinator, but I've been led to believe that that's genetic...I guess the point is that while I still tend to leave things until the last minute, I'm at least producing better-quality rushed things. Ergh, that doesn't look quite as good on screen as it did in my head. But I think my mind is a bit better organized now as well, so maybe I won't need to rush things as much as usual anyway.

I think that's covered most things for now. One last random thing, though: I had a dream the other day, very vivid, that I had rediscovered this very long and involved fantasy book series that I had loved as a kid and remembered the plot of quite well. It had been adapted to a film I actually liked and rewatched part of, and I even managed in the dream to scrounge up copies of most of the books involved...anyway, it all felt very real. I woke up wanting to reread the whole series, only to realize that I'd entirely fabricated the whole thing. It was rather depressing. It isn't the first time I've envisioned a book in a dream that was just awesome beyond belief, that I even knew intimate details of down to the fonts used and the illustrations on the covers, only to find it wasn't real. I can never write them either, because they're never my style and, you know, only make sense in the dream. I'm fairly sure this most recent one was extremely meta, in that many of the characters were actually authors who I happen to like. Neil Gaiman showed up at one point. Anyway, thought I'd share. I have no idea why I have dreams like this--the next stage up from my wild and epic ones? I do not know.