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.

A Multitude of Faults in Alaska

Lately a lot of people I know have told me that I have to read The Fault in our Stars, including people that I don't usually talk books with. In fact, it's mostly been people that I've never talked books with. The last time that happened was a few years back, when Twilight came out - which I never got around to reading because I was a fresher in undergrad. This time things are a little different.

I read Looking for Alaska when I was in high school, and I remember being squicked out by the dynamic of the oral sex scene between Lara and Miles, followed closely by being irritated by the male character's lack of reciprocity and the female character's lack of dimensionality. There were other things that bothered me about the book, including the incident with the stolen Breathalyzer and why that was important or proved anything, but it was a first book. With A Multitude of Katherines I realised that the main character was reducing all of his girlfriends to equations, threw the book across the room, and decided to never read John Green again, because there were too many good books out there for me to waste my time on ones that were so half-baked.

And the years rolled on, and YA boomed while I had my back turned, and now everyone I know insists that he has produced a masterpiece, and I'm a bit sceptical as to whether the author who squicked out pre-ideals 16 year old me is capable of producing a masterpiece. But then, in the past ten years I managed to gain the education and vocabulary to explain what about his debut novel bothered me, so it is not inconceivable that he has also improved with time. So at first I thought that I'd go back and re-read all of Green's books, just so I could explain coherently why I don't like his work when people gush at me about the latest instalment. 

But then I had an idea.

My first degree is in analysing books, essentially. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to compare or contrast two texts. And it's been a long time since I've had the chance to read some Young Adult fiction. And the overlap between people who I've heard mock Twilight and the people who are telling me to read Stars now is substantial. 

So, as soon as I can hunt up used copies of both of them, I think I'm going to do a comparative reading of The Fault in our Stars and Twilight, concentrating on the things in Green's early work that bothered me when I was younger. Off the top of my head (and ten years on) that would include the complexity and agency of female characters, the consistency of tone, the logic of the plot and the world, and the overall shape and pacing of the novel.

And since there's no where else for me to put it, whatever I come up with will probably wind up showing up here.

Upgrade, brain fluff, and proselytizers

At my last supervision, Henry said: "Screw it, stop worrying and just hand it all in." And so I have handed in my documents for the upgrade, all seventy pages of them, and it suddenly feels like I'm on holiday. They probably could have stood a bit more revision, but I have gotten to the 'just don't care' point.

And now there is nothing standing between me and drafting the novel. Which is not going as well as it could be. At least there's death. And sensuality. In fact, so far the thing consists of nothing but death and sex interspersed with Bible quotes, which as a book also has a good amount of death and sex in it.

Which brings me around to Jehovah's Witnesses, and things I haven't said.

A lovely pair of older women came around last week while I was revising and asked me if I thought the dead could live again, and since religious groups are Pertinent To My Interests, we wound up chatting happily on the doorstep for quite a while. I truly enjoyed hearing about their experiences with the church, and how it could improve my life, but when they told me that the Bible contains the blueprint for having a happy family, I bit my tongue.

There is one thing about the PhD novel that is completely autobiographical: I learned to read at my parents kitchen table with a large print NIV bible. We went through the whole thing several times, one Old Testament chapter, one New Testament chapter, a Psalm, and a Proverb every day - we may have skipped the prophets a bit. The book is many things, but full of happy families is not one of them. It could justifiably be called a compendium of models of screwed up families. Absalom and Tamar. David and Bathsheba. Lot and his daughters. The best Happy Family principle in the whole book may be, "do not divorce your betrothed for being knocked up by the Divine," and even that required angelic intervention to bring about. 

So now I'm hoping that they'll come back, so that I can ask them how exactly their logic runs. Or I may just write my own list of Bible-based principles for a happy family. The first one would probably be, "If you capture a woman in battle, let her mourn for her dead countrymen for a month before taking her as your concubine; there's nothing worse than when your girl starts crying every time you kiss her."

There is one definite plus to the novel - it's given me reason to look up lots of questionable things. Like when the words 'condom' and 'cocksucker' came into common usage, the etomology of slang terms for homosexuality (thank you, OED), when the Pill became widley available, and what a 20 year old female student of journalism might have used to research marital relations in preparation for her wedding in 1973 when her mother wasn't on speaking terms with her because of said wedding. Heaven help anyone that glances at my browser history. 

Conversation with my supervisor

H: "The voice is working, but the novel so far shies away from intimacy."

S: "So I need more...intimacy?"

H: "Exactly."

S: "Does that mean that I should write a scene where they have sex?"

H: "Not exactly."

S: "But sex would fix the intimacy problem, wouldn't it?"

H: "Well, that's one way to fix it."

S: "They're both from incredibly repressed backgrounds; if they have sex they'd probably die from guilt."

H: "Still. Intimacy."

S: "Right. I'll think about it."


~Later that day, while meeting with the other degree candidates~

A: "What are you doing tonight?"
S: "Drinking whisky and writing sex for Henry."
A: "...That sounds wrong on so many levels."

Big secret: Everyone's already had the Big Serious Earth-shattering conversations, and I'm probably not going to revolutionize the novel through my supervision discussions. But they certainly make me do things I wouldn't do otherwise.

In other news, my critical supervisor suddenly adores the three thesis chapters I've given her, and I submit for my upgrade in a few weeks. So, yay return of sanity, however fleetingly you may grace me with your divine presence!