The unbearable lightness of degree work.

Sometimes I forget that I'm actually doing a degree, that much extraneous paperwork crops up. Granted, it's all important, life-and-career related work, but I'm starting to really look forward to term breaking up, the Hub emptying out, and all the little undergrads wandering away so I can get in some quality time with my thesis work.

The upgrade panel is supposed to be in the first week or two of June - it's usual to give a body more time between starting the degree and upgrading, up to a year and a half, but there appears to be sudden pressure on the Uni to move along students in general and internationals in particular as quickly as possible.

I have enough fiction drafted for three upgrade panels, but the critical part has me nervous. Dr. Potter recommended that I start off with just reading around as much as possible to get a firm grasp on the subject, so now I have a lot of opinions and not much else. Well, tell a lie; I have opinions, subject matter coming in the post, lots of notes, and a deadline of 5k words for her in about a month.

To limber up for the critical writing draft, Dr. Potter decided that we should do a close reading together. So I found a piece of literature that I knew had been expurgated in one of the books I was looking at, read it over, and brought it to her office. At which point she read it over and asked for my analysis. And after doing an imitation of a beached trout for a few moments, I gave her a pretty solid analysis of the effect of expurgation on the meaning and impact of the extract. So apparently all I'm short on when it comes to the critical piece is chutzpa.

Some of the material I'm reading for background is really delicious though. Over the weekend I may have accidentally plowed through a history of expurgation written in 1969 instead of doing the work I actually was supposed to do, because it was so wonderfully tongue-in-cheek the whole way through. So between that and the heavily annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet that I also plowed through as background work, I now know more dirty lyrics and bad words than I thought possible when I started the degree.