The Ideal

I've read exactly two works by Plato.  One is Cratylus, which is a debate about whether words are arbitrary sounds that we all agree to assign to objects or whether they have some inherent correctness in naming the things they represent.  It has lots of yummy quotable bits about how language works, and it's great for my dissertation.  The other work, which honestly was a struggle back in college, was Phaedrus. In it, Plato spends lots of time explaining that every physical object in the real world is just a spin-off of an ultimate, pure form or idea that exists... somewhere (I never grasped where).

At the risk of being obnoxious, if the Platonic ideal of the academic life exists, I may be living it right now.  The tourists have mostly gone away from Cambridge, and I have the month of September mostly to myself, with literally nothing scheduled all day but to get on with work.  Much of the time I'm accompanied by my best buddy here, Martin.  Here's a picture from when we went hiking in his hometown in July.  There are a few fourth-year PhDs who are quietly panicking in the lead-up to submitting in a few weeks, but otherwise it's very peaceful.  Perhaps too peaceful -- I'm not getting much done, to be truthful.  But it's nice to be able to sit in the stillness for a bit longer.

In order to stave off panic, I've drawn out a calendar on a single sheet of paper that lays out everything between now and winter break.  It makes it seem possible that I'll get a full draft of this unwieldy thing by December.  I'd just feel better if I were making more hay while the sun shines.  That's a purely metaphorical sun, by the way, because about a week ago, someone upstairs flipped a switch and gave us mid-October after beautiful shorts weather.  Sigh.  Still, even rain on the river is pleasant in the private silence of having a floor of the library to myself.  Except that my tummy is squawking right now, so I think I'll join the MCR tea & cake gathering that's starting in a few minutes.

Stay tuned for my next installment, in which I make up for the 'image crafting' to which this blog contributes and give you a pretty piece of music.

Summertime, and the livin' is -- easy?

Well, the livin' has been regulated and fairly relaxed, anyway.

I'm back in England after a month at home.  During that time, I found a very pleasant routine within which to work on the clump of items all due very soon.  I worked at my desk, reading and writing by the light of my courtyard-facing window, I did something to exercise around five o'clock, and then I'd have fun in the evening.  I also spent a week visiting my brother's family in Boise, during which I was more or less the official entertainer of my three-year-old nephew Jack while my parents helped with five-week-old niece Grace.  What can I say?  They're adorable, and I adore them.  And kids are tiring and demand all your attention.  I wasn't too sad to get back to my own affairs, but a mere three days saw me back on the plane to London.

So here I am under the British clouds once again.  It's a drizzly day, which I don't mind in itself -- in fact, it makes it a rather cozy job to scuttle around the library chasing citations.  It's still warm, and it's actually quite lovely autumnal weather.  But it's AUGUST.  This is not okay.  But, well, I'm not sick of it yet, so I'll shrug and bear it for now.

Having moved from the university library to the deserted college library -- seriously, I could sing at the top of my lungs, no problem -- I now find myself in a curious predicament.  I really don't want to slog through adding more text to my Sherlock Holmes paper or edit my summary of Victorian philology into something resembling a narrative with shape and structure.  So instead, I've become uncharacteristically productive at other things.  My school email inbox will soon fit onto one page for the first time in about three years; I've ordered a new raincoat and a copy of the choir photo from June; I've read most of the articles in the links my mom sends me; I'm mostly caught up on friends' blogs.

I also came up with an idea for a conference paper, which has the potential to turn into a much bigger project, post-PhD.  In my efforts to avoid my current papers, I reviewed the call for papers for the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA).  The conference theme is 'senses', and I want to investigate the function of the tongue twister in Victorian times.  I'll spare you all the reasons this could be a really cool idea, but it's also intriguing that I can't find anything on the history of tongue twisters, much less Victorian ones, and I know from my doctoral research that they fit into some very interesting intellectual movements at that time.  This is the first project I've come up with that I can imagine having real legs, apart from a biography of my favorite Anglo-Saxonist, J.M. Kemble -- and that's a tougher sell to postdoc committees, though I still intend to do it at some point.

Unfortunately, none of this will help me meet a deadline.  Back to the grindstone.

That's cricket

I love the expression "that's not cricket."  The closest equivalent expressions in American English would be "that's not kosher" or "that's not cool" -- but that's not cricket has a particular emphasis on the injustice or ungentlemanly/underhanded nature of doing something a certain way, even if it's not technically against the rules.  Good sportsmanship of the old school variety is the key here.

Why this little phraseology lesson?  Because in fact I've been doing something that is cricket -- namely, I've been playing cricket in the gorgeous summer weather during the last couple weeks.  Having had no time for it during my captaincy, I decided to improve my skills through increased experience this summer.  So, I got myself put on a bunch of email lists and have ended up playing with some teams that consist of grad students and/or fellows of Jesus College and Trinity College.  Especially in the case of the latter, I take extra pleasure in knowing that I'm playing with some people who are extremely eminent in their fields but whose biggest concern for those 3-5 hours is where to position the fielders.  I'm happy to report that while I'm not exactly a superstar (okay, I'm always the weakest link), my teammates respect my energy and find me more competent than they probably expected from someone raised across the Pond.

The Ashes urn is one small trophy

Meanwhile, the world of professional cricket has been abuzz with the ongoing drama of the Ashes.  This is a showdown between England and Australia.  It's named the Ashes because the first time that Australia beat England on their home turf in what should have been an easy win, a newspaper quipped that English cricket was dead and the ashes were being sent to Australia.  The captain of the England team commented, as they headed down under shortly thereafter, that they were going to bring the ashes back.  In reference to that, his future wife gave him a little urn (just a few inches high) with some ashes inside -- and that's what they play for.  You gotta love the wonderful absurdity of tradition in sports: Stanford and Cal play for an axe blade; England and Australia play for a Victorian perfume bottle.

Spot the heat spot

Just as with baseball, the Ashes is (are?) played as a sequence of matches.  England won the first one, but just barely, after blowing a pretty good lead.  It also depended on a video review that used a heat signature to prove that the ball just barely tipped the bat before being caught -- therefore getting the batsman out.  Talk about a close shave!

And did I mention the weather has been amazing?  It seriously feels like I'm in California -- in fact, the numbers show that it has been warmer than home this week.  I'll be able to test that comparison myself in a few days, but I decided to stay in Cambridge for most of July in order to make a big push on my dissertation.  I did manage to get a revised Chapter 1 to my supervisor, and I got plenty of feedback on it...  It's interesting speaking to other Trinity Hall PhD students who started when I did, because we're all coming onto the straightaway, and we're all starting to feel a bit bored with our projects, very ready to just get them done  and out of our lives.  But meanwhile, summer evenings are for savoring, and I can't think of any better way to spend one than out in a field catching a ball.

Back to work (well...)

Cambridge students have a slight problem in terms of their online presence.  All that's really visible to the outside world -- our facebook friends, family, blog readers -- are depictions of us in black tie, hobnobbing like high-class toffs.  In our defense, that's the kind of stuff you want pictures of.  Hunching over one's laptop in the library doesn't tend to scream "Kodak moment" to most people.  (As an aside, do you think that expression will live on now that film is not the primary means of taking snapshots for most people, or will I just keep using it in isolation, the way my father still calls the refrigerator the icebox?)  In any event, there has been the usual array of such events to document in the past couple weeks.  Here's a snapshot version of them:

• Choir dinner.  Not nearly as much fining as last year, which is a good thing given I've been up to embarrassing shenanigans...
• MCR farewell dinner.  I laid off the alcohol but enjoyed seeing my friends celebrate the end of the year.  It was also following the one good day of bumps, so I was feeling good.
• Boat Club Dinner.  Pretty self-explanatory.  Lots and lots of attempted or real boat club incest to watch happening at the after-party.
• Downing May Ball.  Finally a may ball that lived up to its reputation!  A good group of friends, plenty to do, see, eat, and drink.  Happy!
• Trinity Hall June Event.  This remains the best event of the year, in my opinion.  Between the college grounds being so cozy and knowing such a high percentage of people, I can just wander carelessly until I bump into people I know, chat with them, go see some music or dance at the silent disco, or whatever, and then move on again.  Love it so much.

In the midst of not sleeping very much, I also threw together a paper for a conference on Sherlock Holmes.  It was an interesting and convivial gathering.  Almost no one -- even the "proper academics" -- was a specialist in Holmes, but all were fans of some ilk.  Some, indeed, joined us from the online fan community, and it was refreshing to have their razor-sharp knowledge of the canon and unabashed passion at hand to inform discussions.  And for all that, they didn't wield their knowledge to take the rest of us down a peg, as they might have done.  As you know by now, my research has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, but I thought it would be a nice distraction / chance to branch out.  And in reading through the stories, I actually did come across a throwaway comment by the great detective that I may work into my dissertation.  My paper was on a personal hobby horse of mine: "How Smart Is Watson? or, The Role of the Sidekick".  I ended up arguing that Watson is an intelligent person hamstrung by his author, who needs him to fulfill a certain narrative role.  I hope I didn't stray into surrealist theatre, but the answer to the title question really seems to depend on whether you look at the doctor from inside the fictional world or outside of it.  They're planning to publish some of the papers in a book, so fingers crossed!

And now it's back to the grind, if I can reacquaint myself with where I left my PhD.  Today I avoided the madness of graduation day (much love to my undergrad friends who are moving on...) by staying in my room trying to produce words.  Y'see, my supervisor and I came up with a schedule that should theoretically produce a full draft by Christmas.  The problem?  I could manage the volume if all I had to do was write.  Unfortunately, there's still a lot of hunting around to do.  Throughout the PhD, I've been much more comfortable dealing with the stuff that gives context for the fascination of philology (language history).  I'm really struggling to identify exactly where that influences Tennyson's poetry, as opposed to him just knowing and liking old-fashioned poetic words from, say, Milton.  Fortunately, the first chapter is all about setting the stage, so I can indulge in the "easy" stuff for a while longer.

A word from the captain

First Mays colours at last!

It's over.

Things I accomplished as THBC women's captain

• Putting together a full crew early in Lent and Easter terms, which stayed almost entirely consistent.
• Getting three women who had quit and sworn they'd never row again to come back -- and enjoy it!
• One of them is now going to trial for the university boat.  I'm taking credit if she ends up being a rowing super-star.
• Taking a full VIII to training camp in Henley
• Avoided getting spoons in both sets of bumps (just barely...)

You can know all these things and yet...  I also know that the women's second boat essentially didn't exist and was a joke in both sets of bumps, and that we're now dangerously close to falling out of the first division of bumps if next year doesn't do better.

Upon finishing my duties, I expected to feel thrilled, happy, released, or even just relieved.  I feel none of these things.  I mean, I did have an odd realization while checking my phone on Sunday that there was no possible way for it to contain a crisis I would have to fix; that was cool.  But on the whole, I just feel drained.  It's not that I'm sad not to be captain anymore; I'm sad that it's over without my having gotten any success to show for it.  There are any number of reasons and excuses for it, most of which I couldn't help.  But still, I wish my legacy had been more than going down three places in bumps both times and not much of any other racing to speak of.  Last year's captain and Martin the boatman have made it very clear what they think of my leadership and the results I brought about.  They are what make me angriest, because they have undermined my efforts in a number of ways and then been judgmental about the consequences.

Honestly, the biggest difference I made was also probably the least noticed in certain quarters: it was a shift in the atmosphere.  Under the previous captain, despite her very healthy opinion of herself, almost no one was happy.  Very few women wanted to be in the first boat, and all of the novices who started last year quit.  Every single one.  This left me with almost no one to build a crew out of.  Now, I don't want to be just a club that turns up for laughs; I want us to be competitive.  But no one is going to choose to spend 14 hours a week doing something that makes them miserable -- certainly they're not going to continue doing it for two more years.  So I've tried my damnedest to get the good vibes flowing again.

As I've been disgorging my woe to everyone lately, the same comments tend to come up repeatedly.  First, I probably learned a lot from this experience.  Maybe that's true, but I certainly didn't learn how to be firm or disciplinary or especially persuasive (which would've helped), nor did I learn to distance myself emotionally from the situation.  I did learn to ask people even when you think the answer will be no, because sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised.  Second, they say what a great thing captaining will be on my CV.  I think that would be very true if the person reading it had any idea just how much work it was.  I'm not convinced anyone who hasn't done it themselves could possibly understand what it took.  Finally, I'm told I've done a great job in difficult circumstances.  That's nice as far as it goes, but I can honestly say I hope never to have to receive that dubious compliment again.

I have a strong sense of the history of the club, which is part of why I want to contribute to its glory, not some 'inevitable' ebb in its success.  So for my speech at Boat Club Dinner on Saturday, I focused on what makes me proud personally as a rower, and what I hope is also a point of pride for the girls in my boat who are new to rowing this year.  Women only started rowing bumps in 1974, and then it was in IVs.  I went through the crew lists and counted how many different women had earned first-boat colours (i.e. the crescent on my pocket, like a varsity letter) in May Bumps.  (And yes, I'm spelling 'colours' Britishly because it's a British concept/tradition.)  To date, only 165 women have gained that honor in the history of the club.  Six of them did it for the first time last week.  One of them was me.  My name will be on the honour boards that go up in the boathouse, and when rowers are looking up at them during core exercises 200 years from now, they won't know anything about the results or the tears or the petty jabs.  Hopefully they'll be inspired to be part of the big picture, too.

Countdown

I'm sorry it's been so long.  It has been a busy couple months, but at last I'm on the straightaway for ending an academic year that has been -- well, let's go with stressful.

When last term ended, I stayed in Cambridge for an extra week for some bonus choir rehearsals with a French school choir we'll be visiting in August.  Then I had a very hurried two-week visit home, during which I worked on a conference paper for the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in Boston.  That conference was really the best experience I've yet had.  I was in the only panel on the first day, which was followed by drinks and dinner, so people knew who I was and had an instant topic of conversation.  I met some really fun fellow Victorianists, and the theme -- simply the year 1874 -- brought out a wonderfully eclectic mix of paper topics.  Plus, I've gone to enough conferences now that I'm starting to recognize some people, and vice versa.

Once all that was done, with an extra day to visit a couple Cambridge friends now at Harvard, I returned to England for a week of rowing training camp in Henley!  In case you don't know, that's the site of one of the most famous regattas in the UK if not the world.  Here's a scene from the film 'The Social Network' that's set at Henley Royal Regatta.  The training camp was a major accomplishment, because a series of obstacles crept up, which I had to sort over email with a time difference as I was trying to prep and do the conference.  It looked dead in the water several times over, so I'm very proud that it happened.  There's a picture of us on the last day, after slogging through the unceasing headwind for the last time, and having pre-dinner drinks in Leander club, home to a lot of Olympians and generally amazing rowers.

I left straight from Henley to London, where I stayed just long enough to see the band Fun in concert (awesome!) and catch a few hours' sleep before flying to a conference in West Virginia.  Yes, I had miscalculated the timing when I applied to that one, but it turned out to be really good for connecting with some people.

Since then I've been navigating Easter term with a surprising amount of free time every day that nonetheless hasn't been terribly productive.  I blame the undergrads, who are crammed into the college library, making it very tempting to try and "work" in the MCR.  You can guess how effective that is...

In any case, there are just under two weeks until Bumps start.  Four days after that, I will be a free woman.  So all I have to do is make it through 16 more days of captaining and I will be able to step back and recover my love of the sport and humanity.  Sorry if that sounds melodramatic.  It's been a bumpy ride.

The benefits of a hidey-hole

People sometimes say that (as far as they can tell) I don't get angry.  This is an untruth.  Earlier this year, I've been so impotently angry about rowing things that hot tears have flowed many a time.  Last week, I was angry at myself for getting into a bad situation with a friend of mine -- angry for letting it happen and for the fact that I couldn't do anything but face the music.  (No, I'm not going to go into specifics.  I half-promised something that I couldn't deliver on, and I hurt feelings in the process.)  Times like this, it's absolutely essential to have two things: a hidey-hole and some really good friends outside the situation.  By hidey-hole, I mean someplace small, dark, and remote such that you feel no one will ever find you.  A place where you disappear off the map.  Someplace that approximates the hole in the ground that is so often proverbially wished for.  I had one when I worked at Stanford for when people pissed me off, and I have found one in Cambridge.  It's very important, that hole.  It's a pocket outside the universe when I need it to be.  I'm not going to tell you where it is.

The other item is friends outside the situation.  This is not necessarily because I want to talk to them about it or get an 'obejective' opinion.  Sometimes, on the contrary, I want to hang out with people who have no idea about the snafu/cock-up/drama.  Their very obliviousness re-submerges me in a world where X didn't happen, which is a welcome reprieve.

I'm happy to report that the particular situation in question seems to be on its way to healing (touch wood!).  Meanwhile, I had a good weekend.  After a less-than-stellar bumps campaign, my crew went to London to row the Women's Head of the River Race (WeHoRR).  Here's a photo of us taken by someone on one of the bridges.  It's a long way to go (6.8K, ~5 miles), but it's not as bad as you think it will be, since you're going with the stream, and the venue is so epically big compared to the tiny Cam.  Everyone had a good time.

The next day, the chapel choir sang Fauré's Requiem for evensong, which was a special treat in honor of our director's having been at Trinity Hall for five years.  We'd put a bunch of extra rehearsal time into it, and we performed it well to a packed house.  Afterward, we all got very drunk.  While it was a fun night, it sounds like the rooms of the two organ scholars were left in a state that could set up another rendition of 'The Hangover'.  Here's part of the email sent by the senior organ scholar to all of us the next day:

"My laptop keyboard is covered in nutella.
My sofa is covered in gin.
My floor is covered in biscuit.
My tie is covered in wine.
My JOS's door is sad."  [Apparently someone put his foot through it.]

Hilarity for all.  But it seems I also may have left some of my dignity behind in the carnage, and tonight's rehearsal will be an interesting test of how much I will have the piss taken out of me [= be mocked mercilessly] for the rest of the year.  Trinity Hall is a very small place, in ways both good and bad.  I don't think it's that good for undergraduates, because there is absolutely no escape from any eyebrow-raising behavior.  The chapel choir is even smaller, and you have to have good armor around your embarrassment bone if you dare do anything foolish around them -- or even if you don't, they do love imagining a good story into things that might actually be innocuous.  Sigh.  It may be time for that hidey-hole again...but hopefully not.