Paris!

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

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

Notre Dame! And lots and lots of people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AT LONG LAST.

My visa has finally been approved and sent back to me. Or rather, to the immigration people at the university. Until it is physically in my possession, I will not be entirely convinced. But still. Ability to come and go freely from England without being deported, hooray!

London!

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

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

Pure class.

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

This is me, in a desperate panic.

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

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

Also:

Obligatory goofy pose with Darwin!

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

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

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

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

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

Whitby: Abbey ruins are my favorite thing.

Doris's sister and her friend are visiting from Germany for the week, so Doris rented a car to take them around, and I happily tagged along for the ride when they went down to the coast at Whitby on a rather glorious day yesterday.

It seems that coastal towns all have the same general feel of boardwalks and artisan shops and random goth stores. It kind of felt like Cape Cod.

However, Cape Cod does not have fantastic ruins on cliffsides. I swear, I will never get tired of these half-crumbled churches and abbeys, they are just way too beautiful.

It was a fantastic day for picture-taking, as is probably apparent, and for the first time in what seems like aeons, I actually brought my own camera, so I had a lot of fun framing shots.

 

Then we wandered around town a bit--it was really crowded with families, since it's Easter vacation--and walked out along the harbor.

 

After that, we had lunch at a pub before climbing back up the 199 steps to the abbey (apparently the number is a big deal? It was on a sign post) and heading home. Spring is cooperating quite nicely so far!

Success!

My Carlyle chapter is done! 13,000 words, another 40 pages down, and I actually feel good about this one. It felt substantial and coherent, and not just the ramblings of someone who has done too much reading and not enough thinking. Hopefully my advisor will like it.

Also, it is Maggie's birthday on Friday, so we are doing celebration stuff both on the day and on Saturday as a way of blowing off some steam. Fun times in Newcastle, which will actually still have people in it, unlike Durham! This place is such a college town, it is absolutely desolate right now since all the students are on Easter break. It is very strange.

Okay, bed now! My brain is exhausted.

This is a post of procrastination.

If their radio silence is any indication (which according to the immigration people, it is), then the border agency has not even given my visa application to a caseworker yet. Their lack of efficiency is making me stabby.

I seriously should have just taken a six week vacation at home and done the damn thing from there. Le sigh. Swings and roundabouts.

Anyway.

Despite having a far better sense of what I'm doing with this chapter than I did before, I am completely avoiding finishing it in favor of doing laundry and vacuuming. And writing this post. Maybe if I write about the chapter, I will feel better about sitting down and actually doing it? Let's try that.

I think I've spent the last few months completely overthinking this whole project. As a result, my writing style has gone completely haywire, which is very frustrating since I used to think writing was one of my strengths. But I got caught up in writing lots of random research down without properly contextualizing it and everything became a mess, and so now I'm trying to sort it all out again. So far, it's going pretty well, in part because I'm going back into close analysis of specific texts, which is something I'm more comfortable with. On the other hand, at the moment I have the chapter split up like so:

1. Introduction
2. 'Signs of the Times' and diagnosing the Machine Age
3. Romantic Origins
4. Past and Present
5. Carlyle's influence on Dickens (shamelessly lifted from my MA dissertation)

Which is all well and good, but now I'm thinking that maybe 3 and 4, or 2 and 3 could be blended together into a discussion of origins and a primary text all at once, which might be clearer. I suspect I will have to print the whole 12,000+ words of the blasted thing out to tinker with it, traditional cut-and-paste style. I'm going to have to buy more printer credits.

To conclude, if I can actually make my brain actually behave itself, I'm going to try and sort this, so that I can finish the chapter by tomorrow, which will be really awesome.

In other news: I did not win anything at the northeast poster competition, which is a bit disappointing, but oh well. I still hung out with some cool people, and got a chance to print an edited version of my poster out on the university's dime, so meh. I got a complimentary pen for my efforts. I would have liked a hundred quid more, but what can you do.

Also interesting were the talks about public engagement that were included in the day's program, which got me thinking that I would like to get more involved in that aspect of academia. It's one that is meeting a lot of resistance in the upper echelons of universities, but it's importance is increasingly being recognized, so if I can find myself a niche somewhere in there, that'd be good. Hell, if it means I can combine my graphic design skills with my academic ones, that would be verging on a dream job.

And on a completely different note, I sprained my thumb while at Tynemouth by launching myself up onto a ledge and not bracing my hand properly. I didn't even notice it until it kept hurting a week or so later, but yes, definitely a sprain or a strain. It was a very stupid injury, and now I can't play the piano properly for another fortnight or so. Grar.

Okay, I suppose I should actually try and work now. I'm going to experiment with this split-screen capability Scrivener has to work out this editing/blending plan. This program's superiority to Microsoft Word continues to amaze in new and interesting ways!

Tynemouth

Last weekend, Maggie and Doris and I took the day off to go to Tynemouth, which is about a half-hour from Newcastle, out on the coast.

Basically, all I really need to say is that if anyone comes to visit me, this is where I'll take you. It's a short train- and metro-ride away, and even while it was a bit damp and cold, it was spectacularly beautiful. Observe:

This is the ruin of the priory. Just below it are cliffs and a beach that goes straight into the North Sea. It is spectacular and dramatic, and if I was a Romantic poet, I would be writing odes to it.

It's also an odd combination of the old and new, as the priory was built in 11th century, I believe, but the graveyard in the back is at least partially Victorian.

And then there's also a reproduction of a giant cannon-like gun from WWI on the coastal wall, which could apparently shoot bullets six inches in diameter seven miles out to sea. Pretty impressive.

But not nearly as pretty. I mean, really.

>

Pretty amazing. The town is gorgeous too, with townhouses that reminded me a bit of Bath, but the coast is rocky and treacherous and fun to navigate (at least for me--I had hiking boots on, and I have a weird liking for hopping around and balancing on rocky outcroppings. I'm getting in touch with my inner mountain goat, or something).

We also went to the local aquarium, which was unfortunately a rip-off, and walked along the coast for about two towns (which sounds impressive, but towns can be tiny, so it was only five miles, maybe). Still, the views were gorgeous, the weather mostly tolerable, and much fun was had. It's definitely a place to go in the summer as well, since a lot of the shops and restaurants were clearly seasonal, and probably due to open in April or May. There were some crazy people who were already surfing, but I get the feeling that everyone probably descends upon the place in June and July. I'll have to go again then.