Short update!

Things that have happened:

• I had a birthday, marking my steady progress towards uncoolness and calling undergraduates 'you damn kids'. I celebrated with fireworks and sword-dancing and friends and mulled wine. It was good. If I move outside of Britain, I'm going to miss having fire and explosions on my birthday.
• I had a meeting with my supervisor. It was scary but productive. I'm working through the holidays, with an aim to submit my thesis by 1st Feb. I am feeling slightly oppressed, but maybe this will be motivating.
• My students are great this year, and have unprompted and stimulating conversations with each other so that I don't have to do all of the work. We yammered about Robinson Crusoe today, and it was super enjoyable. I hope their essays are good. 
• I had an extended solo/chamber part in choir for Batten's Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis the other day. It went okay! Hooray for composers who wrote good alto parts. 
• Nicole gave me a lovely iris plant for my birthday, which is now sitting and percolating on my bookshelf, waiting to flower in a few months. And my friend Vicky gave me this:

Greatest hat, or GREATEST HAT?

Soon, I will learn Russian and begin to recite morose poetry about the motherland in vodka bars. Brace yourselves. На здоровье!

Productivity was achieved.

I have handed in both my Carlyle chapter and my teaching portfolio in the last three days, my relief is infinite! Then I went to dinner with some choir people at Durham Castle, had lasagna and wine and felt weird about being basically the oldest person within a ten-person radius at the table (seriously, so many freshers, I AM AN OLD), and then went home and slept for a long, long time.

Next up: Marx. And then conclusion. BAM.

Also, I was super handy in the past week, as I patched up a massive hole in the wall of my room up against the window frame, which I'm pretty sure has been responsible for a draft for the past few years. I hadn't known it was there before because some old fastenings from a window blind that no longer exists was covering it up, but I was feeling procrastiductive and decided to get rid of them and voila, huge hole in the wall. So I troweled some polyfill into where all of mortar had disintegrated. Now my room will hopefully be warmer, hooray!

I am taking the weekend off, and then there will once again be many things to do. But I am not thinking about them today.

Progress is being made.

I am nearly done with my Carlyle chapter, only one more section to re-write, and it's one of the easier ones, so I'm hoping it gets done today or tomorrow. SO. I am tentatively on schedule still. Tentatively.

In the meantime, teaching has started! It makes such a difference to have both of my classes in the afternoon--everyone (including me) is so much more awake and ready to talk. I have slightly bigger groups this year, but they seem chatty and clever, so hopefully they will do most of the work for me. We've been placed, however, in one of the classrooms that got flooded last winter, so if that happens again, we may be relocated to somewhere far-flung and inconvenient, which would be very annoying. Fingers crossed for a less rainy winter.

Choir is also up and running, and my friend Jessica and I are pushing for tour this spring to go to Prague. Less expensive than many other places, some great venues, and one of my favourite cities! I hope it happens. But then again, Brussels and Bruges would also not be a hardship. In terms of music, we've got some good repertoire going, and at long last I have encountered a choir director who doesn't mind letting the altos sing the other voice parts in the Faure Requiem when we have nothing to do. I've had a serious resentment of that piece for years now because it's so good and yet the altos get TOTALLY SHAFTED. Two full movements with about three bars of participation, it's infuriating. So I'm glad I can hang out on the tenor and bass (or soprano, depending on how my voice is doing) parts this time around. Singing in bass clef! Good times.

It is getting cooler and more damp now, and the days are noticeably shorter once more. I have unpacked my sweaters and second duvet. My tea consumption is about to double. Maybe the extra caffeine will make me more efficient...

Onwards and upwards

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

THINGS THAT HAVE GOTTEN DONE:

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

THINGS THAT ARE IMMINENT:

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

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

At least it's sunny out. 

:D?

Overbooking myself LIKE A BOSS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the grindstone, and other things

As the title implies, I have been busy getting back into the rhythm of things after a delightful few weeks back home. I will try to remember what exactly it is I've been doing.

It has been quite cold since I've gotten back to Durham, and we even got a fair amount of snow over the past week or so, which was very lovely until it all turned to sheets of ice that took up a good quarter of my route into town, making travel somewhat hazardous. Luckily, the majority of it melted today, so I can start wearing things other than boots again. I like being able to walk places without running the risk of going arse over teakettle.

I am sucking it up and buying some itty-bitty bookshelves for my bedroom because I lack shelf space (and just space in general) so I'm compromising by getting shelves that are super shallow and will fit behind my bed against the wall. This has the dual benefit of giving me more places to put books and also getting my bed farther away from the wall that has a tendency to grow mould. Hopefully this will work. Hopefully I will have enough handyman skills to assemble the things by myself. It will be an IKEA adventure!

I've now had both of my novel groups and my combined honours class start up again, and I'm definitely noticing that I'm getting more comfortable leading groups and thinking of good leading questions to ask while going with the flow of conversation. I'm also particularly glad, I think, for the one-on-one meetings I have with my English students at the end of the previous term, as that seems to go a long way towards making my students feel comfortable with me as well. I don't have the luxury of doing the same with the CH group, and I'm bracing myself for the next CH session in a couple weeks time, as that will be all about genocide and various thinkers' reaction to the Holocaust, which will obviously be difficult for everyone including me. I'm thinking I'm going to take a full weekend to read up and prepare.

On my own work, I'm currently assembling a detailed outline for my last chapter, which will diverge from the previous models of my chapters and use a particular critic--F.R. Leavis--as a framework to look at the combined legacies of my central authors. I have high hopes that this will really make the rest of my material gel, though some of the connections between him and Shelley, for example, are going to be somewhat at a remove, seeing as Frankenstein didn't really get any critical reception from anyone until very late in his career. I'm still figuring that part out.

I'm also writing out a less detailed outline for my whole thesis, with an aim towards marking off what specific things I have yet to add and how transitions between chapters are going to happen. This is both more intimidating and more exciting, as I'm stumbling across various points of synergy that I hadn't before considered, which is great but of course requires more writing. My to-do list will probably grow exponentially for a while. But at least it's full of fairly concrete things, like, "You should definitely finally get around to reading that extra book" and "actually go through and make sure all of your spelling is British".

There are other things going on as well, like choir and the AHRC grant getting started, but that can wait for another time. In short, lots of things are happening, but I like being busy.

DONE

My work for this term is over! At least teaching-wise. I will be bringing the makings of my next chapter, as well as some marking, home. But for now, the deadlines that had to be met, have indeed been met. I am trés pleased.

Choir went exceedingly well all of this past week, with an advent procession in the cathedral, a big Sunday service, and then a concert and carol service on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Our director is changing jobs next term, so it was his last week with us, and it ended up being rather emotional, but very lovely.

Also, I'm happy to report also that my students seem to be doing very well--no truly terrible essays, and a few very impressive ones that I definitely could not have produced my freshman year of college, so kudos to them. I met with almost all of them individually to go over their work, and hopefully that was helpful to them as well.

It is bloody cold here, and damp, and I am currently wearing three layers and a scarf indoors. Last night I spent the evening with my back against the radiator in my room. It's pretty gross, is what I'm saying. But I got a second duvet the other week to stuff in with my first one, so I'm sleeping very cosily at least.

Above all, I'm looking forward to being home for the holidays, but seeing as that's coming up very soon, I really have no reason to complain!

Life update, and a castle!

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

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

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

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

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

A better indicator of distance.

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

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

Inside the castle. I really like ruined architecture.

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

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

One more washed-out look.

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

I am returned to the countryside

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dependency upon the internet is truly astonishing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huzzah work and money!

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

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

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

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

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!

Post of procrastination!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Teaching Q&A

Nicole and I have written a Q&A on our first experiences teaching over at the NENC blog. Read it here if you're interested!

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!

I have run out of clever post titles.

Clearly since I have a truly ridiculous amount of notes to sift through and carve a chapter from, the best thing to do is write a blog post instead. Logic!

The past month has been quite busy with a lot of choir performances and travel and such. The trips to Ripon and Great Ayton both went well, Great Ayton particularly, where we were also provided with a fantastic dinner and managed to make some money from tickets and CD sales that will go towards the tour in Rome. More recently we've been doing all of the Lent services and such, and then St. Chad's Day happened on Saturday. Obviously, its original purpose was to celebrate the life of the saint, which did in fact happen, and there was a festival service at the cathedral for it. On the other hand, however, it's also basically St. Chad's College's excuse to have a day of clowning around and boozing while wearing a lot of green. When I went to sing in the festival service, a lot of the choir had been awake since around 5 AM having champagne and running around the bailey. Good times!

On the academic front, I had some very good news from my last teaching session--I was observed for the final tutorial by one of the professors in the department, and his feedback was very positive. There were definitely a few moments where discussion faltered a bit, which I identified, and so he gave me some suggestions for how to remedy that, but overall it seems that I'm doing a good job, and he's assured me that he'll be recommending me for further teaching next year. So with any luck, I'll have a few more classes next year, possibly even an advanced course, which would be fun.

Additionally, I did a workshop on lecturing that will put me in the running to give a lecture next year during the students' study period, which could be fun/nerve-wracking, and definitely a nice addition to my CV. It will no doubt be infinitely more stressful than leading tutorials, but I might as well get used to it now. Ah, public speaking, I am bad at you.

In other news, I just sent off an abstract for a conference that Northumbria University is hosting, which I'll definitely be attending whether my paper gets in or not since it's so close by, and my friend from Leeds who helps run the NENC is organizing it. Its theme is 'Transforming Objects', so I thought I'd compile some of my earlier work on impressions of industry by various authors and industrialists into some observations about machines and how they're perceived. It'll be a nice change from the close biographical work I've been doing lately. There's also a giant Carlyle conference that's happening in Edinburgh this summer, but I'm not sure whether I want to go--it's a bit pricey, and I'm not sure whether I want to deal with finding accommodation and everything for a conference I'm not presenting at. I might just go for a day or something. We'll see.

And now I really must get back to finishing the Goethe chapter!

Life Update: Epiphany Term Edition

I have been terribly remiss, once again, about updating, so I shall try and piece together latest news in the order of what I remember first!

Holidays at home went splendidly, and were desperately needed after a hectic end of term. It was wonderful to see everyone, and meet the kitties! It's probably a good thing I don't live with them all the time though, because I would never get anything done; I'd be far too busy dangling ribbons in front of their faces.

This term has been going well so far--I was able to meet with all of my students about their essays, which seemed to go well, and then their tutorial on Bleak House was quite successful, it seemed to me. The novel itself was enjoyable, once again beating out Great Expectations, which I'm pretty sure I will never like, although Bleak House didn't grab me until about halfway through, which is a lot of pages to invest in. Nevertheless, I was hooked for the last four hundred pages, even when I couldn't keep all of the character names straight. Seriously, it's a cast of at least twenty secondary characters, let alone the central ones, and that is a lot to remember. I nearly brought a chart to class.

Choir is going well; I think I've finally hit a groove where I can learn music fast and keep track of the order of services so that I'm not always scrambling for different pieces of sheet music. We're going on a short field trip on Sunday to sing a service in Ripon, which is somewhere south of Durham. And then in a couple weeks were going to Great Ayton to sing a proper concert, so that should be fun as well.

I had another singing lesson, and hilariously have been informed that my American accent is getting in the way! It was the first time I'd sang something in English for my teacher, and my diphthongs are apparently not to be borne. I must learn to say "Lord" and "for" more poshly. I'd probably be told the same thing in the States, actually--I remember someone else telling me that I swallowed my vowels, so it's probably the same sort of problem. In any case, I was amused, and shall adjust my accent accordingly.

In other news, I have decided to put myself on a more consistent study schedule that will keep me motivated while not causing me to burn out. I'm aiming to spend full days in the library or the postgrad room ever Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, with a steady rotation of books getting covered each day. It will hopefully make me significantly more productive, and also save me from library late fees. So far it's been working well, but I'm only a week in, so we shall see. I have managed to cover a fair amount of reading, though, so I have high hopes.

I'm reading up on the life of Goethe as well as various critical readings of Faust in order to flesh out the writing I've already done on him, and it's been quite engaging. It's been particularly interesting to explore the background of the original myth and its variations during the medieval period, pre-Marlowe. The original guy who Faust was named for seems not to have been considered by anyone to be even close to a redeemable character, or even tragic. Epithets leveled at him by his contemporaries include devil-worshipper, braggart, rogue, and pederast. Fun times! Definitely needed those centuries in between of distortion and political turmoil to transform him into a tragic hero.

In any case, I'll get to talk about Goethe as well as begin to incorporate him into my work from previous chapters next week, when I'm leading discussion at NENC's monthly reading group. I'm definitely looking forward to it--I was sad to have missed the last couple of meetings due to being away and then jetlagged, so it will be good to see everyone in the group again and get some new perspectives on the stuff I've been buried in.

I think that basically covers everything. We finally got snow and it stuck around for about eight hours before melting, but it's remained cold and damp, as per usual. I shall remain shrouded in cardigans and tweed, feeling more and more like a woolly academic, until spring arrives.

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.

A lot of singing, and a very boring desert island.

I had a pretty awesome though exhausting Sunday, which began and ended with choir, and was filled in the middle with cramming as much knowledge about Robinson Crusoe into my brain as possible so that I don't make a complete fool of myself in front of my students.

I accidentally forced myself into getting a fair amount of cardio because part of the way over to St. Chad's at nine in the morning I realized that I had forgotten my robes and had to go back and this was on a day when our director particularly wanted us all to be on time because another choir was visiting to sing with us. So I ran (in a skirt and heels, mind you) back to the house and then back into town and just managed to slide in before the proverbial bell, but was a damp mess due to both sweat and the light rain. But then the rehearsal and service were fine, and the visiting choir were very nice, and afterwards there were eclairs. Tea and cake, I'm telling you!

After window shopping in town with a couple of other choir people, I then parked myself in the library for the entirety of the afternoon to read nearly the entirety of Robinson Crusoe, because I have to teach it in the beginning of November, and promised to email guiding questions to my students by this Tuesday. Man, I'm sorry, I know I'm an English student, but this book is boring. Incredibly important, and often quite interesting from a developmental standpoint, but boring. There is a reason I have avoided most of the first half of the 18th century. I adored, on the other hand, the essay on it by Virginia Woolf. Here's an excerpt:

It is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective. For this reason he thwarts us and flouts us at every turn...Before we open the book we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we expect it to give us. We read, and we are rudely contradicted on every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. (From The Second Common Reader, copyright, 1932, by Harcourt & Company and renewed 1960,  by Leonard Woolf, pp. 50-58.)

It's a brilliant essay, and accurately describes, I think, the average modern reader's reaction (it certainly did mine). The novel is very much an experiment in narrative, and while occasionally exciting--there are battles and wild animals and of course, a lot of shipwrecks--it is also told from the point of view of the lowest common denominator of what makes a sensible man. There is, as another critic pointed out, nothing to make Crusoe at all distinguishable from anyone else--he has a certain amount of intelligence and resourcefulness, but no particular taste or preference for anything beyond what is most useful to him, and his emotions are more akin to physical ailments than feelings.

And yet at the time of its publishing, it was galvanizing because it was fiction, but it achieved verisimilitude. It was not a true story, but the sheer fact of Crusoe's (and Defoe's) unimpressed, undramatic style of narrative made it ring more truthfully than was expected of a fictional tale. One would not expect Crusoe to lie or to exaggerate, because he, as a character, lacked the personality or creativity to do so. It's a strange but fascinating trick, and one which his contemporaries were enthralled by.

I was not enthralled, though I was interested from the historical point of view. Which I suppose is enough to be going on with. I have definitely enjoyed looking at the critical articles around it--getting the Norton edition was a good choice.

Getting back to Sunday, I emerged from the library ravenous roughly six hours later and wolfed down a sandwich before heading over to the cathedral, where we did another small performance which was mostly interesting not because of what we were doing, but what was going on around us: It was sort of like an open house for the university's Christian Council, so there was a massive candlelight procession up from the center of town into the cathedral, which we watched as we sat in the stalls with all of the lights off listening to booming organ music and looking around at just how creepy and cool the spires and carvings were by moonlight. Then someone gave the processors a tour of the cathedral by lighting up different parts of it in isolation to describe what order it was all constructed in. Then finally they turned most of the lights on, and we sang some pieces in front of a thousand-odd people who were all milling around and taking pictures and gawping. It was bizarre.

After that I got home around ten and pretty much collapsed into bed for the evening.

But yeah, singing in the cathedral is badass. I'll definitely be looking forward to doing it again. And in the meantime I have to get back into the rhythm of literary analysis, because I am clearly rusty after having spent all of my days doing historiography and stuff. Good times!

Word spew life update!

Oh dear, it has been AGES since I've posted last, so this will be a scattershot of news, in order of whatever I can remember first:

SCOTLAND! Scotland was wonderful--had a great time with el parentes, wandering about in random cities and seeing castles and taking absurd numbers of pictures of ruins and then going up to the Isle of Skye, which is kind of like stepping back in time by a few centuries in terms of how the landscape feels. I kind of get why Tolkien's conception of Middle Earth was so epic with landscape like that to inspire him. So yes, there was much wandering, an eensey bit of mountain climbing, and lots of tea and beer and fish and chips. Definitely a much needed break from work.

Check out this landscape:

Pretty sweet, I'd say.

Since I've been back, I've attended three teacher training sessions of varying degrees of helpfulness that have mostly gotten me acquainted with how to grade fairly and facilitate discussion. I feel prepared for my preliminary meeting with my students, which is happening on Tuesday, and then depending on what texts they say they want to focus on for the proper tutorials, I'll have more or less material to prep and read up on. Hopefully they will like the same books that I do!

I have also joined the chapel choir of St. Chad's college (I know, I had no idea that there's a saint named Chad either--I feel like he'd wear popped-collar polo shirts and terrible plaid shorts), because I missed singing and also having a sense of when weeks start and end, and the time commitment will definitely go a long way towards putting me on a more consistent work schedule. I managed to land a place as a Choral Scholar, which means that I learn the music independently outside of rehearsals, do a few more services, and get paid for the privilege, which is pretty cool. The ensemble sounds quite good, and the scholars especially are a nice tight group of voices, which is exciting. I've managed to not get struck by lightning for my heathen ways yet either, so that's good. Instead of fire and brimstone, the Anglican church tends to be more about tea and cake, which I can get behind.

On the other hand, altos are woefully outnumbered, which I'm really not used to, and as a result I've had to step up my game a bit in terms of supporting the section. I'm one of seven altos in the choir against maybe twenty sopranos, and two against three among the scholars. So on the whole, it's best if I don't screw up very often. On the other hand, though, everyone's really nice, and apparently Chad's has a way of adopting lots of people because it's generally considered the college for all of the nice people. Also, we get to sing in the cathedral several times, which is ace.

In other news, my semi-new flatmates have settled in well, it seems. Verity's very nice, and I already have an invitation from her and her mom to come and visit them in the Lake District; and I can geek out with Tom about comic book movies and other silliness, which I appreciate.

As is usual during term, time seems to be going by at a rather fast clip, so I've been out of the house quite a lot trying to juggle my newly busy schedule and research. I have a meeting with my teaching mentor tomorrow, which I think will mostly just be me poking my head into his office and saying 'hi', since I won't have done any teaching yet. His name is also Simon, so I can see this getting confusing fast.

I'm nearly finished with my conference paper, which I'll then send out to everyone I can think of to take a look at it before I start working on the powerpoint to go along with it. After that, I'm going to try and crank out at least a part of my Faust and Frankenstein chapter. I got an email from Simon saying that I was in good shape and could slow down a bit in term of sheer material production, so if I can get that one chapter done over Michaelmas and Epiphany terms, and then begin another one during Easter, I'll still be on schedule to finish the whole thing on time. I kind of want to get this chapter done as quickly as possible so that I can start looking at the really fun stuff--mainly, Marxist historians, and then maybe some films? Or maybe 20th century literature? Too many possibilities! But I think that that's where it'll feel more like I'm exploring new territory, rather than reinterpreting heavily-trodden ground. I'm determined to at least touch on steampunk somewhere in here, though I'm not sure where yet. But it's definitely relevant and important, so I'll find a way.

I think that's all there is for now--I have to speed my way through all of the books on the syllabus for my course so that I actually know what I'm talking about, and then I have at least two or three books on the queue for fun reading, although they're maybe not exactly what one would term light: I've been meaning to read Generation Kill for ages, and finally got a hold of a used copy, and I've dipped a toe into Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, which reminds me a lot of The Lives of Others despite the differing time periods, in terms of the sort of pervading fear and somewhat detached but still very affecting storytelling. So, lots of good things literature-wise too look forward to.

And finally, I have booked my tickets home for the holidays, so I am now guaranteed a proper Christmas this year, which I am very excited about. Until then, however, I shall be very busy indeed.