Hannah Swithinbank

Not in Kansas Anymore

Yesterday I finally met my new supervisor and got introduced to the department by some of his students. Yay for people to talk to who aren’t inside my head!

New boss-man is vaguely suggestive of portly series one Blackadder, but with more brains. He is very busy and likes to refer to himself as Francis Cornford’s Young Man in a Hurry. Who I now have to google. This means I won’t really have to talk work to him for amonth, which is good as it gives me time to do some. He also wants us to only speak German from December. Man the panic stations.

So I now have a desk to work at in the department library in the Philogium (which, btw, is an arcitectural gem featuring permanently broken escalators rising up its core). However, the library doesn’t open till 10am. Which I failed to check because I am so used to the libraries I use opening at 8.30 or being locked with keys of which I possess a copy. So instead of writing job applications/reading Sallust/doing German prep, I’m in the cafe drinking some truly awful espresso, spinning out my time online.

From the THES…

“American academics attend conferences in best bib and tucker, they are on time, they ask intelligent questions, they are polite, they have beautiful teeth and they are disappointingly sober. Now, all this could be construed as professionalism – particularly when compared with the drunken, late-night antics of the flip-flop-wearing, unshaven and almost always sunburnt Limeys whose most pressing questions are “where’s the bar?” and “does anyone remember my room number?” – but, I assure you, it is arrogance. Make no mistake: their reverence for the subject, thoroughgoing knowledge of its intricacies, prolific capacities to produce research of the highest standard … what unspeakable arrogance!”

(“Arrogance” by Peter J. Smith)

It is particularly true of the postgraduates… Though in their case it is probably more out of fear than out of arrogance. What that says about the character of their professors…

I be Done.

So, I finished my PhD thesis. Three weeks ago now, actually. It’s deeply odd – especially now I’ve stopped being quite so maniacally busy and actually get to sleep in and do nothing in the mornings. I’m trying really hard not to get lazy, but to get up and do stuff – even if it’s only reading through the really large pile of novels I want to read out in the garden with a pot of coffee.

I think I’m happy with it, the thesis I mean. It’s not quite the thesis I wanted to have written, I think; and it’s certainly not the thesis I proposed to write four years ago (which was going to cover constitutional evolution from Sulla downwards, in 80,000 words. ahahahahaa), but I think it should pass, and I’m mostly proud of it. I could have spent another month or two refining it, but you know what – I would have gone stark staring bonkers. So I let it go. I think by the time I viva I’ll be ready to go back in and really shiny it up. I *am* proud of the theory and I’m 99.99% sure it works – it’s just the expressing it in the discussion of the texts where the problems come, because there are two major-very-interlinking strands, and it all gets a bit complicated writing-wise.

Currently, I’m trying to get my brain enthused about new stuff, which is a bit harder. It’s had a tiny break now, so I’m started to get behind the idea of new projects and work. I had to go back into the office the day after I submitted the thesis to cook up a research proposal for a bunch of fellowship applications that are all coming up in the next month. I had to get it to the second supervisor so that he could read it in time to write me references before he gets caught up in moving to Rome. It was horrible. I sat at the desk and went, “Hi brain, I know you only just got rid of the three year epic project yesterday, but it is now time to kick in and come up with a new thing, in more than just broad brush strokes.” And then my brain fell out of my head and lay trembling on the desk. I got the ‘research completed so far’ bit drafted that day – a good thing, since I can’t do that now! My brain actually no longer wants to think about what it spent the last three years dealing with. At least till the end of November, when it’ll have to, in order to do the viva.

The applications are mostly done now – and for any others that come up I have a 2000 word block of recent work/proposal to edit as required (seriously, Cambridge colleges, you’re full of smart people and you couldn’t come up with a unified application form?). So I moved on to packing and moving and cleaning and painting and gardening, and all those things you have to do when you’re moving new lodgers into your house, and are trying to sort out what you need to take to Germany for the winter. And then I drove from Scotland to Cornwall.

Now I get to try that whole, ‘holiday at home’ thing. It’s been a while – since most holidays involve me running off across the planet with a duffel bag and a pile of camera gear. So I’m going to get back to that pile of novels now…

Woe is Me

I am having a rubbish day. Pah. Rationally I know that I have three weeks left and that it will all be ok as long as I don’t just go to the Edinburgh Festivals for the next three weeks (let’s not talk about how tempting that is, ok). But it has been a fairly rubbish thesising afternoon. So I’m giving up till Monday.

The morning was ok. Yes tired and headachey and grouchy about working on Saturday morning (and can I please not get sick now, k. No being ill for the next three weeks), but I got through the revision of the Cicero chapter and I think the argument now works. I hope. Then I sent the thesis off to the secondary supervisor to give him enough time to get his comments back and do something with them (a bit of me thinks that still won’t happen) – and off course now I am absolutely bricking it. He’s not read anything of mine in ten months, and I’m not convinced he knows what my thesis is trying to be about any more. So it’s effectively a test run for my examiners looking at it, and OMG what if he hates it? So, mildly panicking, and I’ll probably reach the point of hiding under my desk when I next get an email from him.

After lunch it all went to hell – I decided I hated the writing in the Sallust chapter, and I couldn’t get past it to deal with the argument like I was meant to be doing. I was effectively pouting and stamping my foot at a 79,500 word document and it was mocking me with its very existence. So I’ve given up and made a list of all the things I still have to do to the thesis instead. And I *think* that if Christopher doesn’t hate it, I should be able to get it done in the three weeks.
Finish checking the Sallust argument on Monday. Write Abstract. Insert a couple of things into the Cicero chapter that I didn’t have the books for today. Proof for spelling and grammar. Final check that argument works. Format. Write embargo request and get supervisor to sign it. Print. Bind. Submit. Those last I can do in the couple of days in the fourth week from now, before running off to Leeds.

Plus, I have to cook up a 1500 word research proposal on a topic yet to be clearly defined, in time to have my supervisors write me references by the 11th of September for the first of upcoming bunch of JRF applications (I won’t get one, but I have to apply anyway, because academia is about masochism. Clearly).

Now I’m trying not to panic again. It’s. Going. To. Be. Fine. I like the introduction and first two chapters of my thesis. I really do. I just have to learn to like the rest.

The Thesis is Being Edited.

Nearly there. Only about five or six weeks to go. In fact, I shall be on a train to Cologne in exactly two months time, so it’d damn well better be done in five or six weeks!

No, it will be – I have a full draft, bar the conclusion, which I am going to construct once I have finished this particular once-over of the full draft – this being the once-over that tries to make the argument cohere across 70000 words of thesis. This is a particularly bitch-laden processes, as I attempt to work out if I am, in the core of the thesis, in fact arguing what I have said in my introduction that I will be arguing. I *think* I am – or at least, I’m getting there, shaping and pruning and signposting, and anyone who says that writing history isn’t subjective or guided by ideas about narrative is a Big Fat Liar who has clearly never written a doctoral thesis.

I am currently working stupid hours in the office, getting sore elbows leaning on the desk, trying to plug my way through it. I am pretty soon going to be on 12 hour days, just to allow me enough procrastination and donut eating time. In order to make life easier I have ordered the new laptop I was going to need before going to Cologne in advance, as mine is off to the wacky races pretty much. Also the excitment of NEW TOY! should be good to get me typing away like a fiend for at least three days. I am also listening to all the BBC Proms to keep me company, which, yay for listen again.

I shall soon have eradicated my remaining sanity cells, just so that you are all forewarned. Ta-ra for now.

career re-think

I have signally failed to land any of the year-long overseas fellowships for next year. Now I have no clue what I’m going to be doing next academic year, especially since I have no desire to take up a teaching monkey fellowship for the year, even if I could get one.
The research grant runs out in September, and I need to not live in St Andrews next year if I’m not to go clinically insane, although if I *did* stay, there’d be a bunch of undergraduate tutorials available, since half the department seems to be going on research leave, and all the PGs are wrapping up.
I’m also not entirely sure that I want to stay in academia either – and the conference I’m just back from didn’t do anything to erase that feeling.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
I’m going home to Cornwall tomorrow to pretend the world doesn’t exist.

help!

I have just written the following sentence: “The form of the Philippics both dictates and encourages the the rhetorical creation of such a semantic vacuum.”

Clearly I need saving from myself.