A return to arms

It's been a long and weird year.

I spent a lot of my second year of study dancing around the subject. I think I was scared of the immense weight of the body of text available to me, and as a consequence I wanted to write about everything - a stance that isn't very conducive to a clear and concise thesis. Updating this blog had also become something I was scared of doing, because I often felt as though I should only update it if I had something meaningful to say, and it very rarely felt as though that was the case. The entry from 24th September 2011, "Losing My Way," is a good summation of my attitude for a lot of the past year.

I'm a great believer in harsh personal criticism, so I have no qualms about saying that my behaviour, in which I put off things I needed to do because I was too scared of doing them, was incredibly stupid. After all, who am I writing this blog for, if not for myself? I can't lie to myself in my own research notes, either.

The second-year blues hit me very hard and I took the long way round with regards to my research, something I wish I hadn't done. I hate the phrase, "I don't believe in having regrets," because the regrets I hold have been very important in shaping who I am. There are things I've done in my life (both personally and professionally) that I'm not proud of, or I wish I'd handled differently. Of course I regret the stuff I did and said when I was twenty-one - I was an idiot when I was twenty-one - and thinking about those things makes me cringe and want to do better. I don't let bad memories consume me, but they're a good motivator.

That's how I'm going to consider last year. I was an idiot, but it was a learning curve; as my supervisor said to me (rather ruefully): "Sometimes you need to explore all the wrong avenues to find out which one is the right one." Last year wasn't a total failure: I managed to get two publications and two conferences in. I wish I hadn't spent so much time exploring, but what's done is done and I've learnt from it. At least I finally feel better-grounded in the literature of the period.

Coming up in the next week: castrati, burlesque opera, and eighteenth-century fears about Continental maleness.

The Joys of Planning

I began work on my second chapter about a month ago - far, far behind schedule - and my process has been radically different. I've never planned an essay or a chapter in my life before; I've tried, but I get frustrated and end up launching into the fun, writing stage. I usually end up editing and re-editing my work as I go along, having a vague idea in mind which becomes more clearly defined the more I write and edit.

Up until now, it's worked, although it has always been rather an embarrassment to admit to. It certainly doesn't come across as methodologically sound.

Yet so far the greatest challenge I've encountered in writing my thesis is finishing my first chapter - and that is entirely down to my way of working. As a consequence, I'm planning my second chapter out meticulously - down to the paragraph. While I'm feeling frustrated again - I want to write, not plan! - I can't deny that this has been invaluable thus far. For instance, I'd originally conceived the idea to write about the conflict between classical and Christian interpretations of heroism between 1710 and 1737 - but quite honestly, it was hard to keep this on the topic of comic sword-fighting. If I hadn't planned out my chapter then it might have taken me weeks of writing and editing before I'd come to that realisation.

I am a rather reluctant convert. I still think that there's a lot to be said for starting out with nothing but a few key ideas in mind - it brings a spontaneity to writing that's hard to replicate. Certainly my more successful creative endeavours have been as a result of writing without planning: I know what I want to say and the mood I want to create, and those things would be lost if I spent too much time considering what ought to go where. Academic writing, on the other hand? Well, I suppose that deserves a little more thought.

Losing my way

Perhaps the most taxing part of writing this first chapter is trying to remember to stay on topic. It ought to be easy, but I keep finding myself writing about poetry, or Interregnum duelling laws, or even just plays that aren't comedies.

Yet from the earliest days, my supervisor has always had to remind me to stick to the topic at hand. She suggested sticking a picture of two men duelling next to my computer.

It's not as though I don't find the topic of my PhD interesting; I do. I want to talk about Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Sedley's Bellamira, and Vanbrugh's The Relapse. I think they're funny, interesting plays that are minefields of discussion-points about masculinity. The difficulty is the process of getting there; I feel the need to explain the basic situation, and why, the response to it, and why, what this meant, and why...And why is the core of my PhD at the moment! I feel as though I'm going the long way round to get to the core of my argument, and when I finally get there, it doesn't stand out as the central notion I'm putting forward.

Blogger doesn't have the option to share my mood, the way I could in my teenage LiveJournal, but if I could, it would be "exasperated".

Conference

I spoke at the conference yesterday - and now that it's past, what a weight off my mind! I think my paper went fairly well; I tried to be engaging and informative, not going into too much unnecessary detail as almost everyone there was a classicist rather than a historian of modernity. I was filled with a strange, nervous sensation - I was speaking in the same hall where I had my very first lecture when I was an undergraduate. To look up at an audience, to be from the opposite angle for the first time, felt oddly surreal, as though I wasn't meant to be there.

There were questions at the end, which relieved me - one of my worries was boring everyone into silence - and after the conference was over, a nice postgraduate came over to me to talk about both of our papers. I wasn't expecting that at all, so I was thrilled.

I don't think I'd realised quite how much my thesis work had been put on hold by preparing for the conference; looking at what I've written so far for my first chapter, I feel quite rusty. I think one of the most awkward things about holding down a job while doing a thesis isn't so much the lack of time to write as the lack of continuous time. I have to snatch hours here and there most days - such as on my lunch break or when I wake up in the morning. It would be far better if I were able to gather up all these loose hours and use them properly at the end of the week.

Oh, well, time to get back to my thesis now that the conference is over. No excuses!

Still alive

Blog posts have been rather sporadic over the past month, mostly due to the fact that I've been preparing for my end-of year upgrade, to allow me to move from MPhil to PhD status. To do so, I had to submit a piece of work between seven and ten thousand words long, an annotated bibliography, a working thesis outline (including chapter breakdown), an evaluation of the past year and plan for the coming year, and exercises demonstrating my attendance of research seminars. Additionally, I had to make a fifteen minute presentation of my work so far in front of the other candidates, and have a fifteen minute mini-viva. Quite a workload. I just wanted to write about duelling!


Anyway, I've been very preoccupied with writing and preparing, the consequence being that blogging has rather fallen by the wayside. It was all to the good, however. My interviewers at my mini-viva - comprising of my supervisor, my advisor, and an external examiner - agreed that I passed, which is a huge weight off my mind. I could have my PhD by 2013!

I think my only downfall was the presentation. While I followed the guidelines for submission of work, I didn't realise that there were guidelines for what to include in presentations as well. As a result, I was one of the only people who didn't use PowerPoint, and I certainly didn't make any evaluations of my own work thus far. I was also much vaguer and informal than I ought to have been - so much so that I was asked (in full seriousness) whether the use of satire would be a part of my thesis. I was just telling some jokes to make my presentation interesting! To misjudge the requirements to the extent I did makes me feel embarrassed - I felt very unacademic when compared to everyone else - but I suppose I should try not to let it bother me too much. I was upgraded; that's what's important.

Under other circumstances I'd segue into a review of a book unrelated to my thesis, but this past month I haven't managed to finish anything that wasn't concerned with masculinity, duelling, or the seventeenth century. I did begin two (Hi-de-ho: The Life of Cab Calloway by Alyn Shipton and The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson - the latter an intertwined history of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer HH Holmes) but I haven't been able to finish them. I also bought and skimmed a beautiful book called Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It by Michael J. Trinklein. As you can probably tell from the title, it's a peekaboo look at proposed US states which, for various reasons, never made the grade. This is a coffee-table book, really, and I read it in the same way that one might read a magazine.

I have just started Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire, an elegant account of the relationship between Britain and America during the American Civil War. Foreman is perhaps best-known for her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (which shaped the 2008 Keira Knightley film), and this second book is an excellent follow-up, vividly written with a real feel for the atmosphere. She does seem to be writing more from the Northern perspective - the issue of slavery, rather than independent state rights, is cited as the predominant cause of conflict - but I suppose that slavery was the overriding concern for the interested British. Nevertheless, it's shaping up to be a wonderful book.

I'm taking the next week off from thesis work to allow my mind to fallow a bit. It's been both surreal and difficult over the past few days not to think about it - I've got an open tab of Thomas Southerne's 1696 stage version of Oroonoko which I'm trying hard not to read - but I do think that it's necessary. As of next Monday, I'm going to be tackling the second half of my first chapter; once I'm back into a normal routine, this blog will be updated more regularly again.