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.

I am in the Rachmaninov groove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARGH.

So that whole thing about being registered by today? FAIL.

Apparently (and I'm not the only one with this problem, so...) departments are giving people matriculation concessions like the one I have when that actually doesn't help with getting me registered on time, because my visa isn't under the right institution. I have to be able to get a proper visa from Durham to actually get my ID and such. So the immigration advisors have to call the English department and be all, "WTF?" and then the English department, I guess, has to take a leap of faith and give me an unconditional offer if I'm going to enroll for this term. In conclusion, ARGH.

Like the dude at immigration said, I'm glad I'm not the only one in this situation, but seriously, dammit.

This is what happens when academic departments don't communicate with administration.

So with any luck the English department likes me enough to trust in my ability to not fail my MA and properly deserve my admission to their PhD program. Because if they don't...well, I'm sort of screwed. And/or I'm back to starting in January, or having to leave, or begging Leeds to just get my effing paperwork done faster before I'm, I don't know, rejected from life.

I'm not actually freaking out as much as this post portrays, though perhaps I should be. But dammit, I'm proud of my dissertation even as I begin to find more and more flaws in it, so Leeds should give me my degree, and Durham should man up and give me a proper offer. Or something.

In any case, this leaves me without an ID card, which leaves me unable to access the library. So I'll be mooching off of my flatmates until further notice. Because I really do need to read, like, twenty books this weekend. Yes.

No Longer in Stasis

Fairly self-explanatory. Things have mostly started up. I had various induction-type things on Monday and Tuesday, which were frankly exhausting and not particularly illuminating--the usual jargon of "This is a great school!", "You're the cream of the crop!", then followed, of course, by "But get ready to work your ass off!"

It was a little better than that, and there was some useful information sprinkled in, but that was the general feeling. I had a bet going with an archaeology student as to how many times the international community was going to be referred to as "vibrant". Ah, corporate-speak.

Anyway.

I am almost registered. I should hopefully be completely there by tomorrow. Durham is rather old school with its insistence on lots of real paperwork in addition to online paperwork, so it's a bit more annoying than Leeds' process, but the end is in sight, which means that soon I will actually be able to take books out of the library.

It's a good thing too, because I am plunging straight into research. I had my first meeting with my supervisor, which went really well. He seems both reasonable and personable, and we were able to hash out some of the beginnings of what I'm doing with little fuss. He's apparently quite interested in intellectual history and cultural context, which suits me just fine, considering my topic.

My topic, as it happens, is morphing in new and interesting ways. I think I'm going to start by making a case for studying nonfiction within the framework of the Gothic, which I started doing a bit with my MA dissertation, but didn't really get to address fully. It's an unusual approach, perhaps a new one, but I think it could be really useful, not just for me but for other people looking at political readings of Gothic literature--what are the consequences of reversing the feed, as it were? Is it even possible? I suspect that it is, and I hope I can prove it. The topic can perhaps become the one which I'll address in my first official writing sample, which is due in May. From there I can start examining nonfiction on the Industrial Revolution from a Gothic perspective, and see where it takes me.

So yeah, that's about it. I'm meeting some cool people from all over the place, and getting to know the area a bit more. And writing 3000 words or so in the next week. Hey!

Essay Madness and Picture Time!

Woo my essays are done!

I think they were fairly good as well. I hope. I always get a little delirious at the end of editing so that I can't always tell anymore, but I'm pretty sure they're good. Weirdly enough, the one on DeQuincey actually went more smoothly than the Sherlock Holmes one did, possibly because I knew that I had a lot more work to do on it. The Holmes one proved difficult just because it had been so nicely self-contained, that adding another book into the analysis was at times problematic. I may have stretched the reasoning in that one by the end a bit. Hopefully it was okay though. Anyway, handed them in yesterday, and then proceeded to sleep for forever. It was nice.

So now...massive dissertation work time. I've decided to do different sections for each conference, so basically I'm hoping to get 2/3 of the thing done in about three weeks, which is, you know, terrifying, but I think it's possible. They don't have to be absolutely polished by then, just there, so...yeah.

On the flip side, I just took about eight books back to the library, so the Book Stack of Doom is now just a pile again. Phew.

Also, my trip to Conwy and Chester was absolutely lovely! Erin and I weren't expecting to know anyone else on the trip, but as it happened an acquaintance of ours (who incidentally went to UMass Amherst for a year before transferring to McGill) was also there, so we hung out with her for a bit as well. I definitely want to go back to Wales--Conwy had a fabulous castle to wander about in, not too large, but ruinous in a picturesque way, and Chester had a gorgeous cathedral that I wandered about in for quite a while. The castle at Conwy was particularly cool because they managed to incorporate it rather seamlessly into a modern landscape--check it out:

Suspension bridge and castle all at once! It appeals to the anachronist in me.

We had a proper English afternoon tea in Conwy as well, complete with tiered presentation of sandwiches, scones, and Welsh sweetbread type things, which was delicious.

Chester was a bit more metropolitan, but still quite lovely, with lots of medieval-looking buildings and Roman ruins scattered about, including an amphitheater and garden, both of which we wandered into. I should add at this point that the weather was also glorious, which was definitely appreciated.

The cathedral was gorgeous, and quite atmospheric seeing as there was a choir rehearsal going on while we walked around. A lot of the stained glass had apparently been blown out, possibly during the war, which meant that there are a lot of unusual modern replacements, like this one:

And the cathedral proper is below.

Lovely, yes? Incidentally, I have to share one more picture that I just found totally awesome, because you'll never ever find it something like it in the US. There are various plaques for the dead of course all over the walls, but this one caught my eye.

It may be a bit too small to read, but the gist of it is that this guy was an American, but during the Revolution he supported Britain, and when the British withdrew from New York he dropped everything and went with them, and then probably became a known figure in the church, or something like that. Anyway, it entertained me, because we completely forget how one nation's turncoat is another's hero. Cool to see little random pieces of history around like that.

So anyway, great trip, I'll have to make another to maybe Cornwall or someplace else after conference madness is over. Ciao for now!

Bookstack of DOOM!

So, I am back in the swing of things! And by that, I mean I have an outrageous amount of work to do.

Observe:

This is my Stack of Doom (actually larger than shown, because of all the bought books on my other shelf) which should keep me occupied for the next week or so. To be fair, I think I've read six of them already. So it will probably be fine. I just need them for quotes and such. In any case, my two final essays are due a week from now, and the topics pretty cool, I think--one on the imagined Orient in DeQuincey and Coleridge, the other on strategies of detection and mapping, using H.G. Wells to critique Conan Doyle. Fun times!

I am, by the way, a huge fan of the black book in the middle: Out of Place by Ian Baucom. I'm finding I have very consistent taste in scholars--I like them eloquent, and all over the place in terms of source material. In this one, Baucom looks at cricket fields, Gothic architecture, linguistics, and a ton more in his effort of find places that define the diversity and hybridity of what Englishness has become because of its, and the world's, imperial history. I'm not very good at postcolonial theory, but it was an excellent read, made particularly fascinating by its multidisciplinarity.

In other news, I have submitted abstracts now for both my conferences, so that each is going to focus on a different section of my dissertation. So hopefully this will motivate me to get lots and lots done in the next few weeks (the conferences are on the 8th and 10th of June), so that I'll then be well set up to finish the rest by August and then rework and edit and nitpick to death until September. At least, that's the plan. We'll see how it goes. If I can actually make it work, then my god, I may have beaten my procrastination habit! If only temporarily.

Okay, having read the entirety of Carlyle's Past and Present this morning, I think I need a nap.

Edit: Also, I feel that I should note that it is now a quarter to nine o'clock at night, and the sun is only just beginning to set. Long summer days indeed! I could get used to this.

I really like dramatic titling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And We Are Back in the Swing of Things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much Baking is Afoot

I have just discovered a recipe for "Anarchist Oatmeal Cookies". They sound easy to make and delicious...and also apparently punk rock. It shall be my next project.

In the meantime, I had a piano lesson with Georgia last week! It went quite well--we worked on the Rachmaninov Etude-Tableaux, which is coming along nicely, and I think I'm going to try to learn another short piece to make a set of three with the etude and the prelude that I learned aeons ago. I'm also going to start more serious work on bringing back the Ravel Sonatine, which up until now I've only been sort of tinkering with. So, it looks like I'll have a more consistent and hopefully productive schedule on the music front this semester.

I also have a new flat mate! Yetande was only doing one term here, apparently, and Federica is here for a three month research project of some kind, so much rotating is going around. As her name somewhat implies, Federica is Italian, and may in fact galvanize us all into acting like an actual flat--at her suggestion, we're having a nice dinner night this Friday. The three Chinese girls are making various traditional dishes, Federica is making pasta, and I am, very predictably, making pie. I'm realizing that apple pie is the only quintessentially 'American' thing I know how to do well anyway--everything else is vaguely Italian or otherwise! So that should be fun. Lots of accents and language barriers to deal with, but we probably should have done this ages ago, so I'm glad for the prompting of a more extroverted personality.

Classes start tomorrow, which should be fun--I shall start with my Nation and Empire seminar, which will probably introduce me to lots of new people, given that the subject falls more in the Romantic period than the Victorian. So all in all, good times!

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.

Dissertation: Consider yourself proposed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artistic Distraction!

So, I am apparently back into the swing of things--reading week is over, and classes have returned. We had some good discussion on Daniel Deronda yesterday, and now I'm reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for tomorrow. It's a vast improvement over Agnes Grey in terms of actually entertaining me, but it's also much longer. But that's okay--substance is good!

I also declare my thesis topic tomorrow, which will be tons of fun--I have to reduce my explanation to 50 words, so we'll see how that goes. I'm also accumulating an ever growing stack of books from which to research, as well as lots of online articles that I need to read, which is somewhat overwhelming but mostly reassuring that I'm not just pulling ideas out of thin air.

On a side note, I have discovered that not only is the Middle Eastern grocery much much closer to my house than the big supermarket, but it is also much cheaper, and carries most of the basic things I need for every day meals. It's a hole the wall, but they sell two litres of milk for a pound, and various fruits and vegetables of enormous size, which is basically excellent. I'll be going there as much as possible.

Also, I'm finally getting in some practice time! Georgia arranged it so that I can call her in the morning on the day I want to practice, and she signs me up for a room and lets me into the building. It's sort of a pain for her, but since the music department isn't willing to give me a passcode or key fob or something to get in, we don't really have too many options. It does, however, have the distinct advantage for me of actually making me deliberately take the time to practice, and then use the time wisely. I generally do two hour sessions now, and its quite nice--in addition to a Rachmaninov etude, I'm trying to resuscitate Ravel's Sonatine, which I think I learned when I was 14? 15? Anyway, I'm actually up to the technical challenges this time around, and I like it a lot, so it'll be nice to have in my working repertoire. Vassar sort of spoiled me with all of their lovely Steinways, but the facilities here are fine. The building itself is rather labyrinthine, so I'm glad I have Georgia leading me about.

And finally, I got bored last night, so I did some random steampunk photoshopping. The result? New desktop wallpaper!
Basically made entirely from pictures of pocketwatches and Victorian stock graphics. Fun times!

No seriously, I do work here.

Woo I'm twenty-two...

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

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

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

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

Piano Win!

I have piano lessons! After much email tag among various members of the music department, I was finally able to get a hold of a PhD student named Georgia, who teaches piano in addition to working on her degree in musicology. I just met with her this morning, and she liked my playing (despite it being quite crappy--not only have I not touched a piano in at least six weeks, but the piano at our disposal was a very temperamental upright with very little volume control), and said she would be happy to give me lessons. She's going to email the department to see about getting me access to the practice rooms. Even if that fails, she indicated that since she's in the building working all the time anyway, she can let me in secretly. It was a good meeting, and she seems very nice, so I'll be happy to work with her. Exciting! Finally!

This weekend was quite nice as well. I went into town with Marta a couple times, and then was able to hang out with Erin back at their flat. We're getting revved up about our Thanksgiving plans, which we're holding on the 1st of November. I have to make an epic trip to Morrison's to get all of the baking stuff I need, but with some planning I may be able to go with a group, and then we can split the price of a taxi to get back. Anyway, it will be fun times.

Also, on Sunday Erin and I got our craft on and made picture frames through one of the little bonding sessions the union holds for the students, which was both random and fun. Kind of an activity for 5-year-olds, including poster paint and ridiculous feathers, but we met some cool people, and managed to be slightly more sophisticated in our designs than children. In a couple of weeks, we're going to paint mugs too!

I am secretly still seven. But with better motor skills.

And now I must chug coffee before seminar and finish A Tale of Two Cities, which I'm quite enjoying. I don't know why all high schools insist on students reading Great Expectations first, because that is by far my least favorite Dickens novel so far. Maybe it's the whole bildungsroman thing.

Incidentally, the reason I'm now finishing Dickens today instead of yesterday is that I got distracted by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you haven't heard of it, it is literally Jane Austen's novel word for word (she's credited as the co-author), except that in addition to dealing with Regency issues of class, society, and romance, the Bennets must also deal with the fact that England has been overrun with the walking dead. One would think the device of zombies would get old after the first hundred pages, but it really doesn't. Mostly because not only are there zombies, but also ninjas. Also, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy bond over beheading zombies with katanas. It's like if Quentin Tarantino decided to direct a Merchant Ivory film. Gold. Pure, ridiculous gold.

So yeah, a very entertaining few days, in many different ways.

A very Gothic day!

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

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

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

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.

Free Friday

Yesterday was both fun and productive, despite not having class. I met with a couple of fellow students from my Victorian Lit. class to discuss some poems we're supposed to do a brief presentation on next week, and we ended up having a really good casual discussion not just about the poetry, but about our theses and various other classes. I'm not used to actually having friends who are in my own discipline! But it was nice to be able to talk about which professors to email, and what topics sound interesting and unexplored.

In the evening, I had dinner at my friend Zouina's flat, which is further down the road from mine, and brand new, so the kitchen was quite fancy. Our two Italian friends took charge of cooking, and Carmella immediately went into mothering-mode by stuffing too much food down our throats, which was both hilarious and delicious. It was also a very multi-lingual evening, as at least two people seemed to each have working knowledge of either French, German, or Italian in addition to English, which was really fun even for me and my vast ignorance. Afterward, we went out on the town a bit, because it was apparently "light night," meaning that the city lit up the more significant buildings with projections and light shows. So we wandered around, looked at the projections, and gossiped about English fashion, since most of the student population was out bar-hopping. Altogether, a good night!

Rain and Disraeli

Ack, I had a coughing attack TWICE in the middle of seminar. At least this time I wasn't stuck in a lecture hall, and could excuse myself to go be disruptive outside. I think my professor thought I was dying, though. It only happens when I'm sitting down too, which is not conducive to class participation. Okay, enough whining. It means my cold is going away, so hooray, I guess.

Anyway! Sybil was...interesting. Disraeli, being the political animal that he was, couldn't help but vacillate between trying to tell a romance and giving a treatise on historical and political theory, with some race and class analysis thrown in for good measure. Not precisely entertaining stuff, but it was a fairly good survey of the political climate and the state of unrest among the working class in the 1830s and 40s. It was published the same year as Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England, and one can see Disraeli warring a bit with those socialist views in the Sybil, which was quite interesting, particularly since Disraeli was fairly conservative, and had some rather interesting opinions about how aristocrats should completely separate themselves from the working class so as to better care for them in a terribly paternalistic way. However, my basic knowledge of Marx, or even Carlyle, did not prepare me nearly enough to parse what precisely Disraeli wanted to say about his own political model, because he made it incredibly dense, convoluted, and often a shade hypocritical. That, woven in with the romance of Sybil-the-woman, and Sybil-the-ultimate-symbol-of-Albion-itself, made for some seriously uneven text. But hey, those are more fun to have discussion about, because then we have room to complain a bit.

Incidentally, getting to class was a bit of an adventure, as all us poor English students had to venture into the giant scary complex of science buildings in order to get to our assigned tutorial room. I was very glad to run into some classmates before actually getting into the building, because otherwise I would have been woefully lost. There is some seriously bizarre architecture around that whole block, which reminded me a bit of the H.R. Giger architecture from the Alien movies, except in concrete rather than black piping and slime. I'll post pictures when I finally track down a cable to attach my camera to my computer. I'm very glad I don't have to deal with that part of campus that often. It's even more confusing on the insides of the buildings.

In other news, today was my first genuinely rainy day in England. It's rained a bit during the night before, but I had to drag myself through a light to medium downfall to get to class this afternoon. It was a bit unappealing in terms of actually willing myself to go outside, but it wasn't bad once I was out there, so I suppose that bodes well for my general tolerance the weather here. I'm also mostly used to looking to my right first before crossing the street, sorting out the shapes of all the coins and knowing their corresponding value, and generally getting about. I'm even getting used to saying that 18 degrees is nice weather. So all in all, it's been a fairly easy acclimating period, no doubt aided by massive ingestion of the BBC.

However, I will say this: I cannot for the life of me understand Manchester accents. They are impossible. The guy who came to fix my faucets had a broad Manchester accent, and about four in every five words he said was completely unintelligible to me. Same with Erin's housemate, who's also from around the Manchester area. I'm going to have to develop my ear a hell of a lot to get used to that.

Lists!

I have managed to come down with a cold--argh!--and thus today's entry will be in list form. Let's begin!

Interesting things I've learned about differing school systems internationally:
-The Chinese students are all starting their master's degrees at around 23 years old, but I'm not sure how that works since, according to Summer, they start school at about the same time and each level of education I asked about seemed roughly the same amount of years as the American system. Incidentally, they all look younger than me as well, which is a bit confusing. I'm still the youngin in my flat, apparently. The Nigerian system may be similar, as Yetande, my Nigerian flatmate, is also 23.
-I am, however, the correct age in comparison to the Brits, since their undergrad program is 3 years.
-The Italians don't believe in seminars, and so the two Italian girls I've befriended are freaking out about actually having to do work the whole year round, rather than just studying madly for exams and then being done.
-The Germans strongly believe in presentations, so they're all relaxed about leading discussions, while I am mildly concerned about having to do that for my Bronte seminar.

Speaking of my Bronte seminar:
-Another really good group of people! We had a good discussion about The Professor, a novel in which not a lot happens, but the characters are nonetheless extremely complex, and the issues at hand are gone into in real depth. It's not exactly a book that's easy to enjoy, even though it's got a lot to offer; the narrator is quite unlikeable, his adventures in Belgium aren't particularly engaging, but somehow he manages to marry an extremely capable and independent woman. Still, it's clear how this, Charlotte's earliest work, was a fantastic warm-up to her later novels.
-We're reading a novel a week, except at the end when we read poetry and then Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte. I'm doing a presentation on poetry. At least I'm prepared for it after a summer of poetry analysis!

Other things:
-I'm reading Disraeli's Sybil for Tuesday, which will be entirely new and different, as I'm fairly sure I've only read his essays, and none of his creative work.
-Jane Eyre is up next week for The Brontes, which will be great Gothic fun.
-It is really bizarre to have a fairly intimate knowledge of NYC while abroad. I've forgotten, in my various trips to visit family and friends, just how iconic a city the place is. Every time I mention that I'm American, I get questions about New York, and am surprised by just how much draw the place has. It makes me feel bizarrely worldly, despite it being merely happenstance that I have knowledge of the city at all.
-It is very annoying to not be able to pick up Tylenol or some other equivalent drug from the local convenience store. Oh, over-medicated America, I miss your willingness to ply me with NyQuil when my head is congested.

And on that note, I'm off to bed.

Research Methods

First day of class! It was very uneventful, as it was my only lecture course, "Research Methods". The professor was very winding and tended to repeat himself, resulting in an hour class being extended to an hour and twenty minutes, despite him really only needing to outline about three things. Ah well. The course is team taught, so I won't be seeing him all that much. Additionally, what he did manage to say sounded really great--the aim of the course is basically to facilitate the transition between undergraduate work and research. We write our annotated bibliographies for our dissertations as the final assessment, but more than that, the course even guides us through the process of applying to PhD programs and funding and other practical elements of academia. That's more support than I've ever gotten for applications or my general career, so color me thrilled.

Even better is how the priority of the course is to support my other two courses--I'm used to having to work to make connections between my classes, so it's incredibly satisfying to know that all of my courses are now aimed towards shaping my single, specific interest, and that I'm supposed to borrow knowledge and work from one course to enhance another. Obviously this is the new norm, given that the emphasis is now on specialization, but I'm still pleased about it.

I have lots of reading to do for tonight, so I'll be off. I'm reading Charlotte Bronte's The Professor right now, which is interesting for both its literary merits and not-insignificant flaws. Always worth while to read authors in their developmental stages.