So I guess it's likely that I'm in the correct line of work if...

...after having just finished editing a thesis chapter and sent it off, I started doing some curious Googling of an author that had cropped up tangentially in said chapter, and within an evening had assembled a 20-entry bibliography and sent an inquiry email to a periodicals service to ask about a pamphlet the author wrote, which they have buried among various other obscure volumes, because while said author's poetry has been published (recently, even!), it seems that no one has published his albeit limited prose, despite the fact that he was briefly in correspondence with Dickens, and was, from what I can gather, basically an angry, unpleasant, alcoholic, working class Glaswegian version of Blake, 'dark Satanic Mills' included. That's like, basically all of my favourite things to study in one person, how can no one have written on this dude?

In conclusion, I have lost control of my life, but I have a great topic for an article.

Trip to Bern/Communing with the Shelleys in the Alps

More photos! This time with decidedly less imminent rain.

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

Terrible experiments in photography, aka trip to Gibside

So I will be spamming with photos of Bern in a very short while, but first! In August, a couple of friends and I went on a day trip to Gibside, which is a giant sprawling 18th century estate outside of Newcastle, and I have some terrible attempts at photography to show for it. It was a very grey day and began raining towards the end, so the lighting was terrible, but we did have a lot of fun looking at English bourgeois imitations of Palladian architecture, imagining what it would be like to ride horses around a giant rambling estate, and being sorely tempted to climb some fences to get a closer look at some of the more falling-apart buildings (we eventually refrained, because all of us are on visas and deportation would probably be inconvenient). So! Some highly manipulated and sketchy photos:

The chapel for the Bowes family, who owned the estate. SUPER PALLADIAN. There was someone playing terrible pop songs on the piano inside, which kind of ruined the effect. Nonetheless, very pretty.

There was a big walled-in garden. B decided that she needed one for her future home.

I attempt to be artistic! Flowers were actually shootable without the weather ruining everything.

More flowers. 

The entrance to the garden.

There were apple trees badly in need of picking.

FAVOURITE PART: The orangerie. 

I am utterly failing to capture how awesome the orangerie was. It is descending into ruin very prettily.

Was all glassed-in with state-of-the-art windows and roof during the 19th century.

Tried really hard to be artistic. Filters and gradients fail me.

Giant monument to liberty on the other side of the estate. Ridiculously ostentatious and great.

The banquet hall, which you can't actually get inside at the moment, which is very frustrating. Photo had to be taken from down the hill and across a manmade pond. 

So there you are, fun at National Trust sites, followed by fun with photoshop/lightroom! B and I are hopefully going to try and do more trips like this, because it was really easy to get to by bus, and a nice break from research.

Thankfully, the upcoming photos of Bern are far nicer, because there was real sunshine. Also, I'm slowly getting better at fixing white balance and stuff, so. Please stand by!

Playing Rachmaninoff in the Tate

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am very relieved,

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

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

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

ahahaha oh god

Well, my introduction and first chapter are now finished and sent off, hopefully in a state that can be considered adequate. I can't tell myself, as towards the end I just found myself just cutting and pasting paragraphs over and over again hoping that eventually all of the pieces will fit together smoothly, until all of the words ran together and began looking like scribbles. It was around the time that I started blithely throwing around 'Foucaultian', like that's what normal people do, that I decided it was time to stop.

I'm not even writing about Foucault. What is happening to me.

Anyway, I start in on Goethe possibly tomorrow, more probably Tuesday. Hopefully it will take less time, and not require a new chapter to spring up out of nowhere. Once is probably already too much for that.

Traveling, far and near

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

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

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

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