Tag: work

Not in Kansas Anymore

0

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.

Bookmark and Share
: Academia,Life in Koeln
: , , ,

The Thesis is Being Edited.

0

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.  Read more...

: Academia
: , , ,

72,125

0

That is how many words are currently in the “Thesis Text” document on my computer. All the thesis bar the conclusion is now drafted. This is deeply, deeply, exciting to me. Yes, I have to do a good amount of editing on two chapters, and make sure that I my argument says what I want it to say without deviation, repetition or hesitation. And yes, I have to pick up some bibliography and throw it at the footnotes so that I can fill the ‘learned’ criterion, as well as the ‘orginal’ one. But this is all editing. I have very few New Words to write. It’s actually delicious.

And so I have beer. I have Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And I have about 500 photos from Rome still to edit… But I like this plan for the evening.

Bookmark and Share
: Academia
: , , ,

The Desk

0
My workspace

In honour of the fact I’m probably going to have to move into my office for the next 10 days to get the work I need to get done DONE before I go away, I present my work space. You’ll have to click through to the photo on flickr to see all the notes. Align Centre
Bookmark and Share
: Academia,Musings,Photography
: , , ,

help!

0

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.

Bookmark and Share
: Academia
: , , , , ,

I hate structure

0

Why can I not just present my ideas in bullet point and let my readers work out the line of argument they want to take through them. That would truly be a postmodern thesis.

Sigh. Supervisor numero due wanted me to put together some rough word count ideas for my thesis plan. Haha. This meant I decided to go through all the sections I have written so far and try and work out what I have, word-count-wise, on each topic. If only it were so easy. I should know by now that things don’t fit into neat little boxes of structure with flowing arguments. Working out whether constitutional structures should be talked about before citizen behaviour is frankly the least of my worries. Oh this year is going to be so much fun. 80,000 words of writing here I come. To think that the easiest bit is going to be explaining Foucault and making him relevant.

Hopefully the fact that I’ve done most of the actual work will help? Hopefully. If only because I procrastinate more when I’m reading than when I’m writing. Eeeeeeeee.

Bookmark and Share
: Academia
: ,
Calotropis theme by itx