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.

I have marked 64 exam scripts in the last six days, and it is a beautiful warm day.

I am going to the pub.

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.