Thirty years and maybe a little wisdom

Earlier this week, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday.  I confess I had sort of lost track of its approach, despite having ambitions last term to turn it into a big whoop-de-doo.  Last year was possibly my best birthday party ever because I got all my MCR friends together for dinner and proceeded to cocktail night afterward, where we got drunk and silly together and generally had a grand old time.  This year, I took my cue from that to plan a night with friends.

The evening was considerably calmer this time, but it was still a winner.  Dinner with some folks, a stop at a couple pubs with others, and then back home -- where a small group raided kitchens for wine and we sat talking until 5am in the dim lights of the common room with rain falling into the garden outside.  I got almost no sleep, because I had to be up for training the next day; as Gilbert & Sullivan put it, "Duty, duty must be done, the rule applies to everyone; and painful though that duty be, to shirk the task were fiddle-de-dee."  But it was totally worth it.

"So," people keep asking me, "how does it feel?  What wisdom do you have to share?"  I more or less laughed off these questions, because the difference from one day to another is not that substantial, and therefore January 30th felt very much like January 29th, and age 30 thus far is not strikingly different from age 29.  However, lately I've been thinking that somewhere along the way I've acquired some wisdom after all.  Without going into detail, a close friend (a current undergrad) is having something of a crisis in her personal life, and since I was peripherally involved in the situation she and I have been talking about it a lot in the past few days.  Although it's a thorny and uncomfortable situation, I find that at this age I know -- not just intellectually but in my bones -- that things like this happen, that it's part of the complicated mess of trying to muddle through life with the best intentions, and that it will all work out one way or another as long as everyone means well.  Understanding that, and the corollary that we have to empathize with people in their tight spots, feels like wisdom worth having.  And I'm so much more confident and comfortable in my own skin now than I was at 20 that I'd say the decade bodes well.

New Year's Resolutions

I've never really participated in the tradition of New Year's resolutions.  For one thing, I think you should make resolutions at any time you think you need them.  For another, the societal expectation is that you'll fail at them, so perversely it seems to be actually a list of things you half-heartedly wish you would do better but know you won't.  Nonetheless, I do have a few items this year.

WHEREAS I am in the third year of my PhD, and

WHEREAS extensive delay in completion of my degree would be detrimental to both my professional progress and my financial situation, and

WHEREAS I participate in an unusually high number of activities, which situation requires efficiency of effort for me to continue in them all,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED

• that I will submit my dissertation within the calendar year 2013;
• that I will reply to emails promptly, even if the situation is delicate and/or I am afraid of a negative response to my message;
• that I will not torture myself about situations beyond my control, be they personal relationships or rowing arrangements.

In keeping with these resolutions, I will save my report on Christmas/New Year's for another post.  But here's a picture of where I spent New Year's Day(!!!)

Useful words

There are plenty of lists out there of British vs. American terms for things, and I don't intend to duplicate them.  While I haven't bothered to pick up a fake accent, when in my second home I do say 'queue' instead of 'line' and 'cycling' rather than 'biking', and even 'fancy dress' for 'costume'.  Not to mention that I'll probably be really confused if I ever try to row in my native land, because I hear the terminology is different in that arena, too.  But in any case, there are also some very useful words I've learned in the UK that don't seem to have exact equivalents in American English.  They're so useful, I keep employing them when home, to the mild confusion and amusement of those around me.

Faff

This is the most useful word effver.  It means general fuss and effort that is kind of necessary but annoyingly holds you up in trying to do what you actually want to do.  For example, when you just want to get rowing and someone spends ages taking off their shoes, stuffing their jacket in the dry bin, and adjusting their seat -- that's faff.

Banter

Yes, we sort of have this in the U.S., but we use it more narrowly, for lighthearted back-and-forth talking.  Amongst my Cambridge friends, it means this too, but more generally, having good banter also means having good chat; being a pleasant and interesting companion for an evening, especially an alcoholic evening.

Lurgy

According to the OED, 'Usu. in phr. the dreaded lurgy . A fictitious, highly infectious disease.'  This was apparently coined by a radio program in the 1950s, but I've heard it used to remark on one's general malaise and feeling icky.

Kit
Athletic clothing, especially if decorated with your team's name (aka stash).  I have acquired an increasing amount of black and white rowing kit, and a fair amount of Trinity Hall or other Cambridge stash.

Keen
Yes, Americans know what this means, but it's in abundant use for eager/interested/enthusiastic/supportive/involved.

Now if only I could conjure more useful words to go into the conference paper I'm writing.  Ages and ages ago, I submitted a proposal to talk on a panel about W.S. Gilbert (as in Gilbert & Sullivan); the first time, my paper was accepted but the panel didn't make it into the conference.  A year later, the panel was guaranteed to happen, but I had to re-submit my proposal in case someone else had come up with a better idea in the meantime.  After acceptance #2, I've had six months to anticipate speaking at the MLA, the biggest conference in the humanities.  Here I am in the program:

It's an amazing opportunity.  And I truly have nothing original to say on the topic I proposed.  Seriously, it has all been covered.  Heh.  Well, with any luck, few people will come to the panel, and the other papers will get all the questions, and I'll escape with a nice line on my CV.  But I have a knack for getting a lot of questions...  I've found a perfect, hidden cubicle in the basement of the Stanford music library, and it's dead silent (finals just finished) and lacking all distractions.  If ever I could work anywhere, this should be it.  Wish me luck!

Michaelmas term 2012

I'm so sorry that I've neglected this blog for the entire term.  To be honest, it wasn't a good eight weeks, though there were bright spots along the way.  Rowing proved extremely frustrating as people dropped out or wouldn't commit to the training, and I spent so much time trying to hold it together that I did essentially no work on my PhD.  But let's move on to the good stuff:

Talking at the 19th Century Seminar

The English faculty has a guest speaker every other week, and occasionally they fill the spot with a third-year grad student.  I gave a paper that was basically the best of everything I've done so far, combined into a 45-minute talk.  I got a lot of questions, and while I didn't answer them especially well, people were clearly interested in the topic, so yay.  Here's me listed in the course bulletin:

Christmas grad hall dinner

Cam-mas/Bridgemas

The joking term for the Christmas that happens in Cambridge about a month too early.  The chapel choir sang its two carol services, the MCR had its annual Christmas dinner, and things were generally festive.  You know how people have those miniature Christmas villages they put on tables as decoration?  I want a miniature Cambridge, but it doesn't seem to exist according to my Google searching.  This could be my big money-making scheme...  Anyone good at ceramics?

Boat Club Dinner

After a crummy term, I wasn't necessarily looking forward to BCD, but it turned out to be one of the best evenings I had.  Being captain finally paid off as I got to sit at the fun table with some favorite alumni, give a speech, read fines, and generally feel loved and appreciated.

Me and my co-captain

Trip to Warsaw

My rowing friend Marta, who did her MPhil last year, emailed in November to say that there were cheap flights to Warsaw at the end of term, and would I like to come visit?  So I said yes!  Another boatie and I hopped over for a few days to gorge ourselves on potato-based foods and enjoy the Christmas lights.  Sadly, I've managed to leave my camera cable behind, so I'll have to share pictures later.

...And now I'm back home, pushing my way through a cold that is in no way surprising after weeks of not enough sleep and a lot of stress.  The only wonder is that it took so long to strike.  I'm trying to wipe the mental slate clean so I can start next term refreshed and cheerful like the Sarah of old.

Rowing and freshers

The new academic year is upon us.  I've been completely MIA to my family and non-Cambridge friends as I first spent a week rowing twice a day (see blistered hands, left and right) then a week welcoming all the new grads to Trinity Hall and trying to recruit freshers of every level to try rowing.  Practical results:

• Drank a bit much on Saturday (MCR welcome drinks), Wednesday (boat club cocktails followed by MCR fun), Saturday (MCR cocktail night), and Sunday (first evensong of the year, yay choir friends!)
• Didn't sleep nearly enough
• Hundreds of emails sent and received
• Did ZERO work
• At least three fits of exhausted sobbing, mostly over organizing boat club stuff
• Now have a sore throat

But the thing is, it's all completely worth it.  I admit, it's becoming more difficult to work up the enthusiasm for new people since they come and go so quickly, and I'm realizing that the ones worth knowing will continue to be around; a blitzkrieg of friend-making probably isn't necessary.  Nonetheless, a week of sociality is never a bad thing.  And the weather has been glorious for the most part.

Being women's captain has proved every bit as stressful as I'd feared, but I'm fortunate to be surrounded by people with better strategizing skills who loyally help me.  Adding to my discomfort (both emotional and physical), I have switched to rowing stroke side (blade on my right, not my left).  This feels odd, but it was necessary, and it's becoming more natural.  But the best thing about rowing lately is that we were honored by a visit from Tom James, who was an undergrad at Tit Hall not so long ago and just won his second gold medal in rowing.  See here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/18911517 (he's sitting at the 3 seat with the cap and sunglasses).  He brought both medals and passed them around, and he hung out for the afternoon chatting with everyone.  AWESOME.  He also gave a little speech, and I was struck by the fact that when he rowed for Cambridge, he lost three out of four boat races against Oxford.  It just goes to show that a) results don't tell the whole story, and b) rowing is truly a team sport.  No individual can win a race for everyone else.

Tables and graphs about words, oh my!

Good news first: I seem to have found much more evidence than I expected to show that Tennyson was influenced by Old English and old words.  My goal for the five weeks leading up to term was to write 10,000 words, and I'm 80% there with a week to go.  My slight concern is that my paper is filling up with tables, a graph, and calculations of percentages that I fear will bore my reader to tears.  But as requested (thanks, Adelaide!), here is a sampling.

Example #1
Let's show that Tennyson had an ear for the way Old English poetry sounded.  OE poetry had four stressed beats in a line.  The words that fell on these stresses alliterated (started with the same sound) in a certain pattern: the same sound in stress #1 or #2 (or both), plus stress #3.  And oh yeah, all vowels alliterate with each other.  Tennyson also liked four-stress lines, conveniently enough.  Here are some examples within the poem "Mariana" where he follows the old pattern:

	Stressed syllable
	1	2	3	4
Either at morn or eventide (16)	X		X
After the flitting of the bats (17)	X		X
She drew her casement-curtain by (19)		X	X
And glanced athwart the glooming flats (20)	X		X
The cock sung out an hour ere light (27)		X	X
The clustered marish-mosses crept (40)		X	X
All day within the dreamy house (61)	X		X
Which to the wooing wind aloof (75)		X	X

After that I talk about close-but-no-cigar lines that sound about the same to an amateur (i.e. Tennyson) but actually break the rules by including the fourth stress...

Example #2
It's a graph!  Heavens to Betsy.  "The Lotos-Eaters" is a fabulous poem that riffs on part of the Odyssey.  Go read it!  I'll wait. ...  I'm exploring the fact that a surprisingly high percentage of the poem's vocabulary is Germanic or Norse, not French/Latin.  In fact, it only averages 1-2 Romance words per line, with some sections having none at all.  How do I know this?  Because I counted.  I checked every word with the OED and made a pretty ugly graph.  In case it's not clear, the numbers on the y-axis are the lines of the poem.

As I was discussing this process with a friend, it became clear that someone with more linguistics and computer skills could probably make a project out of doing this kind of analysis on Tennyson's entire corpus (all 1,800 pages of it).  But it ain't gonna be me.

So there you have it, a humanities gal getting her hands dirty with organized information.  Really it's just a product of the fact that I find it much easier to grasp patterns when I see them visually displayed like this.  I read the rules for Old English alliteration many times, but as soon as I drew it out, it clicked.  Plus, I really didn't want to have pages and pages of text along the lines of, "And here's another example of where he does this."  I hope my supervisor finds it useful, too.

Meanwhile, I'm preparing to get rowing started again next week.  I got on an erg (rowing machine) last night for the first time in weeks, and it wasn't promising.  :P  I'm looking forward to getting on the water, but it looks like I will have to switch sides for now, and I know that will both feel weird and reduce my quality of rowing since I haven't done it much.  But to cheer myself up I watch this video of four of us at a regatta in August.  I'm sitting on the far right, nearest the cox.  We reconfigured the boat so that I could sit in that position and set the pace for everyone -- which made me nervous, but was kind of fun in the end.  Forgive the weird deformations as YouTube tries to eliminate camera movement...

Monastic life (mostly)

With the hustle and bustle of Olympics over -- at least the Olympics for which I had tickets -- I have no choice but to return to the library.  But don't feel too sorry for me.  At this point, even most of the grads and summer-research undergrads who were around for the summer have gone home, either because they finished their master's dissertations or just for a visit home.  This means I live a sort of monastic life of semi-solitude.  My day generally looks something like this:

9:30 -- Either just getting up or going sculling with a friend

11:30 -- Settle into my study nest in the Tit Hall library, write a little

1:00pm -- Lunch in the MCR or the lawn

2:00-5:00pm -- Write on my latest chapter until I reach 500 words

5:00 -- Coach people on rowing

6:30 -- Dinner in the MCR

7:00 -- Read

That looks very impressive and studious, but keep a couple things in mind: 1) I waste a lot of time doing other things (blargh, internet); 2) when term starts, I will have very little time for work thanks to being a rowing captain.  So I have to get stuff done now.

Pre-play entertainment at the Globe

But there have been some fun distractions.  One was a trip to the Globe Theatre in London -- you know, the one where Shakespeare worked.  Obviously it's a reconstruction, but I'm not complaining.  I was a "groundling," standing in front of the stage, under the open sky as it faded from blue to dusky purple.  The guy who played Henry V was fantastic, and they even managed to make the wooing scene believable, which I didn't think was possible.

Another diversion was a few days at a retreat/conference on "Life Beyond the PhD."  The English faculty had a bunch of money to send people and were practically flinging it at us, so I joined some thirteen compatriots and a load from other universities at the gorgeous Cumberland Lodge.  Honestly, I was most excited about spending a few days in a swanky country house, and it did not disappoint.  To the left is a picture of part of my room.  Best of all, the bathroom had an actual bath in it!  I used it every night.  :)

My room at Cumberland Lodge

On a walk in Windsor Great Park

Of course, there were also many opportunities to meet other PhD students from around the country, doing many different topics -- in fact, one whole day consisted of giving 10-minute presentations on our research.  It was a friendly crowd, and I even got to know some other Cantabrigians better when we took a long walk one afternoon.  The lodge is in the same park as Windsor Castle, so when the sun peeped out between gusts of chilly wind, it was a lovely place to stroll around.

Now that I'm back in the library, I'm pressing on through the molasses of taking my theories about philology's influence on Tennyson and showing them in his most famous poems.  At the moment, that means looking up every word of "The Lotos-Eaters" in the online Oxford English Dictionary to see what proportion of words he used were of Germanic vs. French/Latin origin.  I may even make a graph before I'm done -- how strange for an arts student!