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.

The not-end

Once again I've passed though the two weeks of the year that are completely confusing.  It's a mad rush to the end, and then suddenly the pace of life changes.  This time last year, the strangeness was compounded by my trying to process the end-of-captaining confusion.  This year, it was strange because it's the last time I'll do a lot of this stuff -- at least as a real student -- but it's not really a farewell because I'll be staying in Cambridge for the summer and autumn.  As such, I'm feeling at once sentimental and still-entrenched.  Probably the biggest representation of this duality is the fact that come August I will move out of my room of four years and into a room in a house right by the river.  I was very lucky to find a place with an amazing location and a wonderful landlady/housemate (touch wood!).  So, I'm excited.  But there's a strong pang of regret to leave my home-away-from-home.

Where's the rest of Kemble?

There has been plenty of fun, to be sure: Boat Club Dinner, the Trinity Hall June Event, garden parties, cricket, and silly rowing under golden sunsets (between thunderstorms).  And remember my favorite Victorian, John Mitchell Kemble?  I encountered him unexpectedly in London, where I'd gone to see an exhibit on Vikings at the British Museum.  Walking through the theatre district, I suddenly spotted an old pub called Kemble's Head, undoubtedly in honor of JMK's father, a famous Shakespearean actor.  The place is now a Greek restaurant, and the food is quite tasty.  (You know I had to go in, right?)

Now summer days stretch out before me, and I have miles of dissertation to go before I sleep.  I'm now very, very familiar with my topic, and I must disappointedly admit that a lot of what I'm saying is ripped from a handful of book chapters and articles I read in my first year.  I've synthesized them to form my own product, and I've definitely added new material.  However, the ideas that I find exciting and interesting about my project have been said more than once -- in fact, I dare to say that they're generally acknowledged already.  I'm saying them in more detail, which I guess is nice.  Well, at least I like where it's all going, it's just annoying how most things have already been said!  Time to work on someone less famous?  But first, we finish.

Good things

In the spirit of feeling incredibly cheerful lately, I'm giving you a quick survey of some Good Things from the term so far.

Choir stalls at Peterborough Cathedral

Right at the beginning of term, the Trinity Hall Chapel Choir sang evensong at Peterborough Cathedral.  This big, beautiful, historic place -- oh hello, Katharine of Aragon's tomb -- was a far cry from our usual digs.  We put in a lot of rehearsal time to blend our voices into the kind of sound that should hang in the air between 800-year-old arches.  The results were good.  And being early evening on a Wednesday, there were maybe 8 people there to appreciate it.  Oh, well.  In Tit Hall, that would have seemed a healthy crowd.

Bursts of summer weather.  A few weekends ago, it was absolutely gorgeous!  While our rowing outings were sadly cancelled due to races on the river, I took the free time to walk to Fen Ditton, an unbelievable picturesque little village just down the river.  My destination was The Plough, a pub with a beer garden right on the river.  I row past it all the time, and that day I could sit and observe the various crews racing past while trying to mitigate my ridiculous sock tan.  The following day, the MCR had a barbecue.  Since then, the weather has only gotten better, and today I could easily imagine that I'm back home.

A field outside St Ives (Cambridgeshire)

Taking advantage of the warmth, a friend and I asked George, my favorite porter, where we could go on a day trip.  He recommended St Ives -- not the famous one in Cornwall, the village in Cambridgeshire.  We reached said spot after a half-hour ride on the guided busway -- a bizarre transformation of an old rail line into a dedicated bus path, distinctly lacking in charm or much of a view.  We saw one of the few statues of Cromwell that are around (he was local to the area), though it dated from the early 20th century.  We also poked inside an unusual chapel built mid-bridge over the river Ouse (pronounced "ooze").  But as usual with these kinds of things, the best part was unplanned; having spied people walking across a neighboring field during lunch, we decided to have a wander and ended up sitting by the river listening to the birds go crazy in the humid air.  Sigh.

Meanwhile, W1 has gelled nicely in terms of rowing together.  There are still enough adverse circumstances that I don't think we'll do well in bumps (sigh), but the outings are a real pleasure, in terms of both the sunshine and the feel of the boat.  And when I manage to make it to cricket practice, my atrocious bowling has become mostly passable now!  We just got our new kit, adding yet more sporty clothes to my swelling collection.

Here's hoping the upward trend continues for another week and a half, so I can get my final chapter in shape by the deadline I gave my supervisor.  He said in so many words that I can't miss any more of them, and it should be possible.  Fingers crossed that it will be another Good Thing for this magical month.

Precise words

I started mulling over the theme of this post during the NVSA conference a few weeks ago.  As with most conferences, the presenters had approached the theme ("Victorian Senses") from an impressive diversity of directions.  Sometimes, to be honest, their highly articulate vocabulary had the effect of making me feel thick-headed.  If you don't regularly work on phenomenology and can barely even remember what the term means, if the word haptic is new to you, if you have difficulty absorbing by ear a densely theoretical essay about a work of literature you've never read -- well, there were moments of NVSA when the universe gave you an opportunity to make peace with your littleness.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure much of the material I couldn't soak up was brilliant.  But if nothing else, it demonstrated the sheer number of words in academese which I simply don't have in the rotating drum of my word-hoard.  (Incidentally, word-hoard is a term I lifted from Beowulf to become the theme of one of my chapters.)

At the same time, I found myself jotting down words that might be useful someday: perhaps something is germane to my argument; perhaps I could call Tennyson's group of college friends a coterie; and I really should look up what it means to deracinate something.  [It means 'to pluck or tear up by the roots, to eradicate, exterminate'.  Just try to imagine the daleks crying, 'Deracinate!  Deracinate!']  It's just so satisfying to fit exactly the right word to something.  Like the old skill of building dry-stone walls, you find the contours that fit snugly together, and temporarily collapse the gap between thought and speech.  I think it's part of what people love about Shakespeare: he can describe common emotions with such eloquence.

Then there's the fun of happening upon something in my research reading that corresponds eerily well with what's going on in my life at that moment.  The day after I'd sent a very incomplete chapter to my supervisor, I read a letter from Tennyson saying that he had given up his latest book draft to the editor with many remaining flaws and he was very annoyed about it.  The last day of April featured a glorious spring afternoon in Cambridge, during which I was reading some of In Memoriam and found the lines,

          Can trouble live in April days,
          Or sadness in the summer moons?

Fortunately, the answer seems to be "no".  Work must proceed, preferably faster than it has been, but spring is banishing sadness and trouble -- at least for those who don't have exams.  The iridescent leaves, the trilling birds, and the strolling Sweaver thrill to the returning scent of life in the air.  If only I could think of better words to fit the shape of what I mean by that.

Happy Easter, everyone

After a week of wonderfully sunny, warmish weather, England remembered that it was England, and the rain rolled in for Easter Sunday.  I sampled what an Easter eucharist is like in King's College chapel, returning home for the remains of an MCR brunch and then a quiet afternoon and evening enjoying the cozy gray day.  Here's what it sounded like outside my window: