Graduation

Considering that it's been ten months since the 2012 MA cohort turned in our dissertations, raised our glasses, and (for the most part) got the hell out of Norwich as fast as possible, it's a little difficult for me to grasp the idea that tomorrow those of us that can be bothered to haul butt up here will collect diplomas. While my undergraduate graduation was a week-long carnival of pomp and circumstance, interspersed with evenings of wine and sobbing, this one looks like it's going to be an efficient exercise in people shuffling, with the briefest possible interlude at the end for cheap wine and nibbles. And I'm having a hard time getting worked up about it since, unlike finishing undergrad, nothing about life is going to change afterwards. Right now it feels like an unwelcome blip in routine that will require me to actually put on clothes in the morning and talk to people, and I know that during any speeches I'll be thinking about all the lovely lovely primary sources that showed up on my doorstep the other day that I could be cataloguing. 

There are so many books in there that they just gave me the post bag. And instead of reading them I have to wear triple layers in July and make nice to people.

An aside: the robes. I love academic robes. I was quite irked to find that our robes will be blue. A rather bright shade of blue. Academic robes are not supposed to be blue. I'm hoping that, despite the color, they will be proper Masters robes, which have lovely deep pockets sewn into the sleeves, traditionally so that one could store one's books in them. Should they be, as I highly suspect they will, mere Bachelors robes, sans hanging sleeves and accompanying pockets, I may be cross enough to say something. 

Feelings about graduations aside, with hindsight I can say that I'm very glad that I did the Masters, I'm very glad that I survived the Masters, and that I'm very glad that I didn't know the reputation of the program or the city before I came across. To elaborate backwards: Norwich is miserable in the winter and provincial all year round, but it's a good place to be when one's purpose is work. Now that I'm on the mend (I'm not joking when I say senior year nearly killed me) I realise how ill I was for a majority of the program, and I wish I had been in better nick so I could have gotten more out of it - but being not well kept me in my room a lot and led to a lot of work getting done, so I really can't complain. It's pure chance that I picked UEA; I was looking for a stepping stone to a PhD, and didn't have any idea of the reputation of the program or the kind of people that would be enrolled with me. It was at times difficult, frustrating, and lonely, but on the whole it was a good thing. I learned a lot technically and professionally, and came out the end of it with a novel and lots of contacts without losing my sanity. 

Now if only I could key myself up to put on a dress tomorrow.

A Parcel of Penguins.

I was drafting this morning, and I realised that I needed to know the date of the Branch Davidian Massacre in Waco, Texas.

I've already looked up the date of the Waco massacre, and I've written it down. Twice. On the backs of pieces of paper that had important things on their other side. So heaven knows where they are now.

I may have written something important for The Shore on the back of my CAS Letter, which is the sealed and notarised document that gets me into the country.

So I realised that I needed a notebook dedicated to information about this novel, since it involves a lot of this type of minutia.

The notebook I bought, because every time I go to a bookstore I spend twenty minutes looking at them

 I have a thing for notebooks. An obsession. And i figured that this circumstance justified indulging the obsession. So I went to Waterstones especially for a Paper Blank. Because they are pretty and I've wanted one for a while. Which is why I didn't go for a Moleskine, which are like crack to every academic I know - someone gives us the first one as a present and then ever after you can't switch back. I have one I was given by the head of the writing lab for tutoring my sophomore year of undergrad, and it still looks new. After being in my bag when a water bottle exploded. Twice.

So I went for a notebook, and I had a poke around, and I discovered something beautiful.

I have the biggest intellectual crush on this man. 

There are one hundred of them.

Left to right: The Art of War, A Room of One's Own, and the Tao Te Ching.

They each cost less than a double on the rocks. 

I've gone to bookstores in three cities and I still haven't found a copy of A Tale of a Tub: The hunt is on!

And they make me happy - Penguin was originally founded to provide good, cheap reading material for people in transit, way back when all the real literature worth reading was expensive and not pocket sized. So having a copy of Mill on liberty feels like a wonderful return to basics. Though I may have taken to darting into every bookshop I pass in the hope of finding them all.

If all of my books were bound in this format The Luminaries would probably be six inches thick.

Oh, and look what wandered over my doorstep today:

There was one thing that surprised me upon finally seeing these two side by side:

See it? Seeeee it?

There's a half inch difference in the thickness of these two books. I measured. And it isn't because Twilight has large print and wide margins. Quite the opposite, actually.

Stars on the left, Twilight on the right

For some reason, I expected Stars to be more substantial. And Twilight to be quite a bit less substantial. Huh. So far, the only comparison I can draw is that one's got a handily short title, while the other is a pain to type over and over again. That should soon be remedied by the four hour train journey to Reading that's coming up later this week. I don't know whether I'm apprehensive or excited.

Bycatch

According to popular wisdom, the weeks following the upgrade panel are generally marked by a loss of motivation and an increase in dissipation. So I'm going to assume that it's normal that I'd rather do literally anything other than work on the novel. I may have turned up to a blood draw appointment twenty minutes early last week because it cut into my habitual drafting time. Also people keep giving me their colds, and who can work when they've got a cold?

So I was procrastinating by poking through the library for secondary sources, as one does. One of the big differences between the sciences and the humanities is that research in most of the humanities has an incredibly long half life; some of the most useful work I've found on the history of censorship was written during the 60s. Since it's summer, I got to de-shelve everything that looked remotely pertinent to child development (for the novel) and expurgation (not for the novel) and spread it across one of the extremely large tables on the social sciences floor. And while thumbing through these stacks of books in search of anything helpful, I noticed something. 

I'd pulled several books that were written in the 1960s and 1970s. Generally, they discussed expurgation as a questionable practise that the Victorians had engaged in but whose time was thankfully over, and adolescents as individuals who needed accurate information about human biology and physiology in order to avoid making horrible uninformed mistakes that would lead to them being inmates of questionably run homes for unwed mothers. 

So when I picked up a book whose author made it clear that he thought expurgation in general and of the high school curriculum in particular was necessary for the sake of the children (high school meaning that these children are ~14 - 18 years old), I thought I'd unwittingly grabbed a book from the 1940s or so. Imagine my surprise to find it had a copyright date of 1993, which means that it's roughly the same age as my little brother. 

It would have been reasonable to assume that that book was a fluke, just one author with a culturally anachronistic view on censorship. Except that view was held in common by the authors of the other books in my heap that were published in the late 80s and through the 90s. I'd had the vague idea that there was a cultural trend towards conservatism around that time, but I'd never had such clear evidence - or seen how dramatic a trend it was. Without it, I probably wouldn't have my thesis topic, but I still wonder what the world would be like if we'd continued on the trajectory we seemed to be on in the 70s. 

By the by, I still haven't found a used copy of The Fault in our Stars, which either means that no one in Norwich or Reading has bought it, or that no one is sending it to their local charity shop. And I'm a bit hesitant to mark up one of the library copies (my school library is amazing), even with mechanical pencil, which rubs out quite well. But I'm sure there will be plenty of other things to raise my blood pressure until a used copy does come along, or until I cave and buy one off Amazon. 

Leveling Up

Thursday was the Upgrade Panel, which I prepared for by losing my keys, drinking six cups of coffee, and being too nervous to eat. And also wearing my lucky socks. I had to go through a similar panel in the final year of undergrad for my honors project, so I was expecting a few hours of complicated questions on things that I hadn't really thought about - in undergrad they made me read all of Faulkner because I couldn't articulate exactly why the three stories I'd given them had their section breaks where they were, or any section breaks at all - and then to be told to leave the room while they deliberated on whether to let me continue on. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the office, sat down between my two panelists, and was told, "You've passed, just so you know. I think we're going to begin with the critical section; tell us about your methodology." So now, against all odds and in spite of what all of my male professors in undergrad told me, I am officially a PhD candidate.

The meeting ended with the directive to take it easy over the summer, and not turn in anything until September, which is directly at odds with the Hub's directive that all students shall be at their desks during business hours. But the supervisors make the rules, I suppose. So I meandered home and celebrated with whisky and a re-read of Bridget Jones's Diary, which is much funnier now that I know what all of the Britishisms mean.

Despite visiting the 26 charity shops in Norwich that I know of, I haven't found a copy of The Fault in our Stars, which is irritating because I swear I've seen one before secondhand. It's also a bit surprising, because popular books cycle through the charity shops at a rate of knots in Norwich. I could always buy it new, but he's already rolling in royalties, and it's a bit of a matter of principle to only support (no matter how little they'd get from the sale) writers that I actually support. In some cases, I'd rather Oxfam got 2.50. Twilight, despite being a few years on from top of the list, was for sale in the first shop I checked, and I felt immensely embarrassed of buying it while not being sure why I should be embarrassed and wondering if there was something wrong with me for being embarrassed.