wooooosh

Look here!. 'Tis my new blog!

I've been thinking for ages that I should probably actually properly concoct a website of my very own, and start bring together my rather, erm, dissipated (?), no, dispersed, web-persona in one place. Having finally submitted the PhD, and beginning to think in even very vague ways about potential careers and what I want to do with the rest of my life, now seemed like a good time. Plus, the move to Cologne seems like a good opportunity for cooking up some kind of photo-writing project.

So today I got myself a domain and have been installing wordpress and moving my blog over there. Eventually I'm going to design myself a nice front page for my domain, and hopefully have some separate portfolio-type pages for my photography and writing. Which will hopefully also kick my arse in gear to do some writing that isn't just ancient history-academe related. I have a rather large pile of travel notebooks for a start.

Anyway, I have no plans to delete this blog yet awhile - certainly not until I get some kind of website on the move, but I will be blogging over there now. I've set up it's twitterfeed, but if you're one of the approx. three people reading over on the livejournal feed and you want to carry on doing that, you're going to have to set a new feed up.

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...

Of babies and life choices

I am just back from a weekend in Leeds visiting old university friend and her husband, and meeting their 10 week old boy. It was a very nice weekend, with catching up and the chance to read three novels, but frankly, having watched her parent wee George, I have come to the conclusion that I am clearly not unselfish enough to have children and actally raise them properly (as opposed to packing them up in a wicker basket and popping them on a bus across Africa with me).

I really do just like my lifestyle of being able to trot wherever far too much. If a suitable consenting adult would like to sign up to come along, I would be ok with that, but children aren't so much consenting as dragged. I was listening to Fi talking about how she only wants to go back to work part-time, and would rather not go back to work at all than go back full time while he's small and my head was just yelling, "I could never do that." And I barely have a career (this PhD thing is supposed to help with that, though).

So I broke it to my parents on the phone that I thought they might not be getting grandkids. My father laughed and told me I'm clearly not maternal. My mother suggested I might change my mind sometime soon. Then amended her statement and removed the soon as she heard the raised eyebrow down the phone. I remainded ho hummingly non-commital and said, I thought if I had children I'd like to get them when they were two or three, and could be left in nursery for a few hours a day while I had a job/life. To which her response was, "Well, you have them, and we'll look after them till they're two or three, and then you can have them back."

Not exactly what I was expecting...

J'adore.

From Pictures for sad children. It's perfection.

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.

something I have been waiting my whole life for.

Well, ok, not my whole life, but the last month and a half at least. You may have noticed my burgeoning affection for David Foster Wallace, and his wonderous writing, since I discovered him at the end of last year. Now there is MOOOOORE.

Acutually there probably is more, lots more, since there are probably humungeous numbers of his essays and short stories out there uncollected, not to mention whatever else he was working on. But this isn't about that. This is about Tennis. Or DFW and Tennis.

David Foster Wallace having been a junior tennis player, properly (as opposed to those of us who just played junior tennis for shits'n'giggles), gets tennis and is pretty much one of the best writers about the game I have ever read. His essay 'How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart' started my affection - because it is just so true. Really great sports people can't explain it. It's why the best sporting autobiographies are by the slightly less brilliantly talented. Why Will Greenwood's autobiography is better than Jason Robinson's, and so on. And then I came across his essay 'Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness' (which was originally an Esquire article called 'The String Theory'), which became the best essay on tennis I'd ever read, despite his lack of affection for Andre Agassi.(1) I read Infinite Jest, which gave me a whole new appreciation for junior tennis, and made me wonder, whilst watching Wimbledon whether the likes of Murray, Monfils, Federer and those other former junior stars were ever as loopy as Hal, Pemulis, John-no-relation-Wayne, et al.

Which note brings us to Federer. There was something odd about reading Infinite Jest, which is that it's dated. It was written in the mid-90s, and set in the future. In fact, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment may actually be this year. But of course, the world has changed rather dramatically since the mid-90s, w/r/t the international situation in particular, and so at times the Infinite Jest version of the future strikes you as a bit odd. Not false odd, or anything like that, it's just that you know we didn't end up where IJ posited we would, and there's no way DFW could have known that, and it's a bit bizarre, like looking at an alternate reality. One of the other things that dates it is the tennis references made in the scenes at the ETA. And when talking about tennis and its purveyors and examples of greatness, there is no Roger Federer. And this, after seven years of wonderous Federer domination, periodically makes the tennis-aware reader blink. Clearly in 1994-95 ish, when DFW was writing (the book was published in 1996) Federer wasn't a blip on the radar spotting potential genius, at least, not in the US. It's not really suprising, since Federer, who is three month younger than me, would have 13 or 14, and barely getting going on the junior tour (the boys tour being different to the girls). But it is another oddity; another alternate reality. Tennis World without Roger Federer (not nice). And since then, I've been wondering, what did DFW think of Roger Federer?

Yesterday, I was absolutely over the moon to discover (thank you Andrew Womack over at Infinite Summer) that not only did DFW think about Roger Federer, he wrote about him, for the New York Times back in 2006, the year Federer destroyed all comers at Wimbledon - even Nadal (who lost the first set of the final 6-0). And now I think that this may be the best essay on tennis ever written (I haven't read DFW's essay about the 1996 US Open though, yet, I'm getting to it). It really really gets why Federer is so special. The bit in the middle where he gets all metaphysical is it; the bit that really explains the Federer magic, the idea that, when I try to express it just emerges as, "It's ROGER FEDERER," with lots of arm waving. (2) The essay is made more special, to me, because I was at that Wimbledon, and I saw Roger Federer demolish Tim Henman, and my thoughts were (apparently, since I recorded them) "(a) back from Wimbledon, (b)in awe of Roger Federer, (c) feeling slightly bad for Tim, because he played so much better than the scorecard suggests.(3) I over, identify, slightly, with the writer of this essay, because I, too, have sat with my jaw pretty much on the floor, watching Federer break the laws of physics. And David Foster Wallace is the only writer I've come across who has expressed what it feels like.


Which, this is about DFW, so clearly there should be footnotes.
(1) Which is a bit odd itself now, the dislike of Agassi, since he has become the Great Legend. I had to think myself back to the mid-90s whilst reading it and try and remember what I thought of Agassi then. And a bit of me would probably have agreed with DFW - I didn't much care for him in the mid-90s, between his first Wimbledon title, which I really enjoyed, and his re-emergence at the end of the decade. It wasn't for the same reasons; I never had a problem with Agassi's game (though I'd prefer not to watch him play Lleyton Hewitt - too much of the same thing, he needs a contrasting player), but I severely disliked watching him waste it for those years there, and I severely disliked everyone who said that he was better than Sampras, when Sampras was practically camped out on Wimbledon's centre court, and Agassi was wasting his talent. I'd be interested to know what DFW thought of Agassi by the time he retired, actually.
(2) It's magic itself, and actually explains why DFW is the Roger Federer of writing. He has the special kinesthetic sense of writing, and is exempt from certain rules.
(3) This further illustrates f/n (2).

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.