Possibilities

Merry Christmas!

This is the time of year when we look ahead to the promise of new things coming. Whether it's the arrival of baby Jesus, the clean slate of a new year, or just the slow return of daylight, it's around now that people tend to think about what's coming next. That's certainly the case for me.

After handing in my dissertation (and after a week's trip to Scotland), I was right back at work to produce a conference paper. It was very much a show-and-tell of my early digging around, but it went over well in London, Ontario -- after I took a week to check out Iceland because, well, I could. (Iceland Air allows free stopovers on your way across the Atlantic.) I saw the northern lights for the first time and soaked in geothermal hot pools next to a semi-frozen lake. Most importantly, I met some fun people who made the week a jaunty adventure rather than seven days of reading in coffee shops. (Though that would have been alright.)

The conference was for the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), and it's a big 'un. The last time I attended was at the start of my second year, and it was maybe my second conference ever. I didn't know anyone. It was awkward and uncomfortable. What a difference it makes to have academic acquaintances to bump into, and friends with whom to nosh on hors d'oeuvres at the opening reception and then slip away for dinner. I had a lot of fun. Dare I say it? I felt like I belonged. The problem with academia, of course, is that such a belonging may be cut short by the economic necessity of taking a job that is available now instead of hypothetically-maybe in a few years, if the wind blows south-southwest on a blue moon Tuesday as two albino magpies cross your path. I'm very fortunate in that I'm enjoying the editing I'm doing on the side right now, and I actually feel valued. It's good to remember that I have skills! So I try to look ahead without too much anxiety.

May the future be as surprisingly pleasant as a sunny
October day in Scotland.

When I was living in my first-ever non-student apartment during the two years following graduation, I used to stay up late scrolling through the Oxford and Cambridge websites, fantasizing about getting to England for grad school. I did get there, and I spent many hours sitting in a library in the agony of trying to write something, and then 500 more somethings -- and despite that, it has been a dream come true. Now I find myself scrolling through job postings and imagining places I could live and projects I could chase through yet more libraries. The brutal truth is that academia is an impossible career to try for these days, even if you've ticked all the right boxes. But we can always dream, right? And what is Christmas if not a time to dream of possibilities?

It's in!

Despite what everyone said,
I did not find this part anti-climactic.

Sorry to leave you hanging for so long, fair readers. In short, the dissertation is in!

I got the comments back from my friends, and by the end I was desensitized enough that I could just run through them and make necessary changes. I held my breath while the miraculous referencing system called Zotero created my bibliography; I fought long and hard with the college printer to get the final version onto paper the day before it was due; I took the two copies to Staples that night for binding; and I submitted them at 12:30pm on September 30. I had lunch with my friends at the pub, and then, contrary to what everyone expected of me, I got right back to work -- but on something entirely different.

You see, I somehow managed to stumble my way into a job as a technical editor for a company back home, so I just might be able to support myself again, rather than being in debt! But I'd been more or less neglecting it during the finishing-up process. So, it was time to catch up.

Not too long afterward, though, my friend Emily came to visit from home, and we took a week to travel in the northern regions of Britain: a cold, gray afternoon in York, followed by several glorious days in Edinburgh and the highlands, and a final treat in the Lake District, where we were glad to have our waterproofs along during one of our walks, because the heavens opened for the first time on the whole trip. It was the perfect vacation, really.

And now? I've been back in the library, taking pictures of how people have represented Anglo-Saxon text in printed books. This is in service of a conference I'll be attending in a few weeks. So, as usual, I'm keeping myself busy. But it's a fun kind of busy, and I'm not at all tired of telling people that I've handed in.  It is a sweet, sweet thing.

Letting other people see

It's coming to be that time when I show my chapters to other people so they can proofread them, and it's a strange sensation. Like all writers, I'm protective of my baby, but I'm also curious what impression it will make on friends who have heard me talk about it for so long. I feel a bit like James Spedding did when he had written a biography of Cromwell; he wrote to Tennyson remarking on what he wanted from critics:

"Is it likely that a man, who has written a serious book about anything in the world, should not know more about that thing than one who merely reads his book for the purpose of reviewing it? [...] What I want to know is whether men and women and children who care nothing about me, but take an intelligent interest in the subject, find the book readable. What its other merits are nobody knows so well as I."

Of course, my friends are hardly likely to be painfully critical. But Martin is a proper historian, so letting him see my historically-oriented first chapter makes me nervous that he won't find it rigorous enough. And Ian is a proper ASNC scholar, so he'll detect the places where I've fudged my Anglo-Saxon literary generalizations. Phil writes absolutely gorgeous prose, so when I send him what I think is my best chapter, I'm still aware of all the awkward phrases and stilted transitions that I just can't seem to make better.

Yet for all that, I know I've packed in a lot of original material. One of my favorite things in my PhD is a single footnote. No one else would have been in a position to write it, and it brought a wonderful punch to the point I was trying to make. Naturally, it's about Kemble.

If you recall, two years ago I met up with fellow Kemble enthusiast Simon Keynes over at Trinity. He showed me a pamphlet Kemble had given to his friend Arthur Hallam. Now, in one of my chapters I make the point that Kemble's friends couldn't avoid hearing him ramble on about his latest projects. Apparently, there was a typo in this pamphlet, because there's a funny letter from Hallam to Kemble assuring his friend that he will "cheerfully […] make with pencil or pen that important alteration of swylce for swylke on which the destinies of mankind may be reasonably supposed to depend." So... did Hallam actually make the correction in his copy? I emailed the eminent Dr Keynes, he sent me a photo, and yes! He did! (Or Kemble did before he sent it.) See, look:

(If you're paying close attention, you'll notice that Hallam was slightly confused. Kemble was correcting an earlier scholar's transcription from swyke to swylce, but the printers goofed and swapped the y and the l. That's what needed correcting.)

None of this has any real impact on my argument, but it's just so darn cool.

The downs and ups

I said in a previous post that I would try to be honest about the downs as well as the ups of this PhD roller coaster, and so I must admit that last week I was feeling very, very down. I'd burned myself out in a race to get a full draft in to my supervisor, then taken a week to go to France with the chapel choir.  When I returned, I discovered that the supervisor and I had seriously misunderstood each other as to what kind of draft he was expecting from me. For two days, I was miserable. I felt betrayed, abandoned. It seemed I would either have to forge ahead with only my own judgment for justification, or slink home, having missed my four-year deadline and been kicked out of the university and the country accordingly. To my unspeakable relief, however, our meeting went very well; it's now up to me to finish the damn thing and submit it by the end of the month. Wow.

One of the plaques thanking Ste Anne for her help

So now that I've climbed out of that pit of despair, I can report that the choir trip to Brittany was a much-needed, crêpe-filled holiday, though it didn't look like your typical holiday. We had all day free until 3:00pm, but staying in the village of Sainte-Anne-d'Auray, there wasn't much to do with that time. One day trip to neighboring Auray broke things up, though it was haunted by our concern over catching a bus back in time for rehearsal.

Each day, after some afternoon rehearsing and a dinner break, we spent our evenings making our legs and feet very sore by standing for long stretches to record our first-ever CD(!!!). When it is released (hopefully on a *real* label in *real* stores!), you should buy it, because it's going to be stunning. Andy demanded the best we could give, and it turns out we had a lot to give into the echoing wells of sound in every nook and cranny of side chapels, shrines, and carved stone. When you listen to Bairstow's "Lamentation", know that it was a grueling night of takes and sub-takes, after which we could only sit round with our wine and stare at each other, exhausted. When you listen to Wood's Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, know that we had sung them so often this past year that we could have done it in our sleep, and so it was an easy joy to let it loose.

And what a release it will be to hand in this dissertation! I can't even remember writing most of it anymore, it's just perpetually with me. I wonder if I've become institutionalized to it, like the prisoners in "The Shawshank Redemption". I'm going to assume that, no, it will be a real pleasure to have the chance to work on something different.

Objects of envy

For some reason, I've been reminded lately of various things I used to covet when I was a child.  Things I saw other people had and yearned for myself, while resigning myself to never having them.  They included:

• A treehouse
• Those red-and-yellow plastic cars you could peddle around
• A scooter (the kind you push, not motorized)
• The board game Clue
• The game Battleship (we eventually acquired it)
• Video game consul -- an uncle actually provided us with a Sega, which was HUGE.
• Salami sandwiches for lunch
• A microwave (got one later)
• Cable (read: Nickelodeon).  That was one of the treats of visiting Grandma Weaver.  We got it when I was in high school.
• A CD player.  It was mega-big when I got a Diskman for a teenage birthday.

Looking back at these, I'm still keen on most of them -- so at least I wasn't a massive victim of '80s/'90s fads, right?  Oh wait, now I'm remembering trolls...

Standards and envy are entirely relative, of course.  Recently, I was explaining to a friend that my nuclear family tends to cling to technologies -- that is, we are late adopters.  Our household phones were rotary types, and all our home movies -- through our late-1990s trips to national parks! -- were filmed on a silent Super-8 camera.  I'd gotten this far in the explanation when my friend cut in to say that it was actually pretty advanced for us to have home movies at all.  He's a full 6 years younger than me, and there are NO moving images of him as a child.  Seriously?

Anyway, while I had a pretty awesome childhood, I don't regret growing up, because look at all the freedom you have!  You can decide exactly what you do, where you go and how you get there, and you can buy the object of your desire if your bank account will allow it.  Fortunately, I'm not prone to overspending, but I still got a thrill today out of buying some plastic storage containers to organize my stuff better.  It's more controllable than the editing, after all.  One week before the draft goes to my supervisor!

In search of completeness

Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, I break the internet.  Google tries its best to suggest what it thinks I really mean, but sometimes it stares back at me blankly as if to say, "Seriously, wtf are you even saying to me?"  This was part of finishing off the tedious process of verifying the words in a glossary Tennyson made in one of his notebooks, then checking a concordance to find out whether he used these words in his poetry.  It's but one example of some ways I've pursued my research over the past four years that were extremely time-consuming and probably unnecessary.  But I wanted to be thorough.

I could credit/blame my engineer father for this fastidiousness, but it also comes from a base level of suspicion I have for how a lot of literary critics go about making their claims.  All too often, they seem to "prove" their points with a representative example or two, and we more or less take their word for it that a general pattern is being described.  For my PhD, I didn't want to operate off my own personal impression of In Memoriam's alliteration.  So I made descriptive categories and I counted them.  It took weeks and some outside assistance manipulating Excel to form graphs.  GRAPHS.  In an ENGLISH dissertation.  Was I insane?  All this for maybe a page of discussion.  Definitely insane.  But as my friend Ian said the other day, the degree must be partly about proving you've done enough work.  That, at least, should not be an issue.

My new workspace

The title of this post has another meaning, too.  I'm ready for this PhD to be done.  It's good to feel so familiar with a topic, but I find it hard to look at it anymore.  It's time to move on to something new and full of potential.  And, let's face it, there are days when I'd really like to go home.  I'd like to sleep in my own bed, spend the morning tidying up, the afternoon sewing at my parent's house, and the evening seeing a double feature at the Stanford Theatre.  But for all its stress, my daily pattern is relatively pleasant -- and I've just moved into a cozy room in a real house, right by the river in a very peaceful neighborhood.  Onward!

Glimpsing a moment of real life

As part of the final push toward the end of my PhD (gulp), I've been reading through the book Tennyson's son put together as a sort of biography -- really a collection of letters and memories he gathered from the poet's horde and those of his friends.  Certain excerpts from this book tend to crop up a lot in Tennyson scholarship, and it's high time I read through it to find a few fresh items.  In the process,  I've enjoyed finding passages that give you a recognizable insight into the real, everyday life of young men in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I was struck, for example, by the way his friend Arthur Hallam described feeling out-of-date at Cambridge, just a few years after graduating (1832):
"New customs, new topics, new slang phrases have come into vogue since MY day, which yet was but yesterday. I don't think I could reside again at Cambridge with any pleasure.  I should feel like a melancholy Pterodactyl winging his lonely flight among the linnets, eagles, and flying fishes of our degenerate post-Adamic world."

And as I'm starting to think about the logistics of moving from my room of four years to a smaller space, I was amused to find Tennyson commenting on the exact same issue:
"I have been engaged in packing books.  I have a good many.  I am afraid I shall be obliged to sell them, for I really do not know where to stow them and the [new] house [...] is too small."

Sunset view from the Jerwood library

In making these observations, it occurs to me that many of you (are there many of you?) probably can't picture how I'm doing this "finish the PhD" thing.  Allow me to describe it for you.  I am sitting Owl-like and solitary in my rooms (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles) the hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel the shouts of drunken Gown and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur. No, wait, that's Tennyson again, writing his aunt in the spring of his first year at Cambridge.  However, most days I am perched in the upper floors of the college library.  The shouts of summer-camp teenagers and tourists drift up from below.  I'm wrestling my raw writing for each chapter into something with structure and argument (I hope!) by staring at print-outs, drawing all over them, and then rearranging the computer document.  In addition, I make little trips to other libraries to chase down things I've put off, like finding the original of a second-hand quotation.  It's all coming along, but slowly, and sadly there's no time for 'slowly'.  Deep breaths and friends at the same table keep me calm.