Well, haven't I been good! Ever since I set up my 'satellite study' (in the bedroom), I have been putting a good number of hours of work in each day. The stiff neck syndrome seems to have merely a temporary adjustment thing, and although it's not ergonomically perfect, my workspace is pretty tolerable. I've knuckled down to considering the 'big questions' of my thesis and the preparatory Q & A piece that I did last week has really come into its own. I've got a tendency to go of at a tangent, and the slightest distraction can send me on an enthralling (but not generally useful) papergoose chase. You know the sort of thing I mean: you read a book and come across an interesting cross-reference, you Google it and find a host of fascinating stuff, websites off websites, print off a couple of PDFs for later...blah...blah...blah...But I AM getting there, and considering that it's still a few weeks until our summer hol, I'm optimistic about making a fair bit of headway. Talking of PDFs, one of the things I fully intend to buy when my funding comes through is an iReader or similar. I have boxes upon boxes of the damn things that I have to rifle through if want a reference - much nices to have it all to hand. Plus I want a PDF editor so I can cut and paste chunks of text - then I don't have to type big quotations/references out in full.
I've bitten the bullet concerning academic German and the acquiring thereof. I registered for an intermediate German reading course that starts in October at the 'uni. over the hill' (not my own uni) and in preparation I'm going right back to basics with a Pimsleur German course. This is the spoken language but it'll revive the long unused Deutsch circuits in my brain. I am quite surprised at how much I can remember, though. Need to think about what books to take on holiday with me. A lightweight novel for the beach of course and, I think, the Norton Critical Edition of the Writings of St Paul. It's got suitably short chapters, so I can keep my scholarly hand in between times and not feel like too much of a donkey when I get back.

The new desk-space is working out pretty well - I am finding the chair slightly uncomfortable height-wise (after 5 or so hours my neck is feeling tense), but nevertheless I am managing to get some words down whilst the children amuse themselves downstairs. The husband has decided that he's going to decorate the hall and landing, so occasionally I am interrupted by sanding-down noises and general scuffling. Having been taxed by my supervisor to write about 'the big ideas' associated with my thesis, I have spent a lot of time scratching my head. Obviously, I 'know' intuitively what my thesis is about (Aspect and Discourse in the Pauline Epistles), but analysing exactly what I want to achieve and exactly how I'm going to do it has thus far existed as only a nebulous cloud (tautology?) in my head. As I tend to work in a somewhat centripetal way, I sat down at the computer yesterday and started to write, only to find out that I am putting down information that is tangential to the target. How many times can I contrast Porter's view on aspect with Fanning's? Quite a few, it would seem! However, this does have the benefit of fixing the various arguments in my head more firmly, I suppose. Getting slightly annoyed, I decided to tackle it head-on in a simple question and answer dialogue.
Q. What am I doing?
A. Looking for prominence readings and discourse contouring in the Pauline Epistles.
Q. How am I going to do that?
A.1) by examining, with reference to current scholarly thinking, the aspectual nature of certain verb-forms,
2) by deciding what the default interpretation would be for that verb in the Pauline Epistles
et cetera et cetera....
This very, very basic format has helped me to clarify the steps that I have to take to produce a reasonably coherent theoretical model which I can elaborate on and polish into a reasonable piece of writing before September.

A Room of One's Own

Thank goodness for Argos! After yesterday's post, I started to have a good look around the upstairs of the house for an appropriate workspace. I ruled out the 'spare' bedroom pretty much straight away: it's only 2mx3m, most of which is taken up by an L-shaped built-in bed and wardrobe. Besides it's south facing and gets very warm in the summer. Plus the dog has adopted as her room, so it smells of dog farts. We've had a couple of plastic crates full of books - untouched - adjacent the door in our bedroom since we had the extension built nine years ago. I got the tape measure and determined that there was enough of a gap for a compact computer desk if I moved the crates elsewhere. Argos had a suitably cheap self-assemble jobby for a mere £29.99 that fitted perfectly, so I bought it and bolted it together once the children had gone to bed. Success! I redistributed the books and utilised the crates for recycling receptacles and hauled the finished desk upstairs. I'm rather pleased - our bedroom is north-facing and so always stays cool, is away from the main road and thus quiet, and has a phone point in it. True, my books are on the ground floor directly beneath, but the husband suggested I could rig up some sort of basket on a pulley and let it down (with a request note) from our window for a child to fill with either books or possibly chocolate.....

I've spent a couple of hours up there working on the laptop this afternoon and managed to get about six hundred words down which is quite as much as I would have hoped to achieve on a 'good' day.

Virginia Woolf was absolutely right when she identified that women need a room of their own in order to write successfully.

Sanctuary!

The school summer holidays have begun and I have immediately identified a major problem: there is nowhere for me to do sit and do my work! The downstairs room at the front of the house has my desk in it and what we consider to be the 'family' computer, the one where we retrieve our emails, download music, store photos etc. I do normally work at this desk, although I use my laptop which is dedicated to university/thesis stuff. This room can get very hot (being south-facing) so in the summer months I sometimes move through and work on the dining-room table at the north-facing back of the house; this is very pleasant as the french windows open out onto the garden. Trouble is, all the music equipment is in the front room so if daughter no.3 wants to play her bass guitar it gets disturbingly noisy. She quite often wants to go on the house computer too - which is fine, except I can't sit at the desk. The dining-room at the back of the house is a continuation of the living area which contains the television, hi-fi and XBox console. Now, the children do get on fairly well together, but tend to prefer their own personal space. Often, when the bright-eyed boy has tired of telly or playing Gotham City or somesuch, he will move into the front room and the girl will watch music channels. If they are confined together too long they tend to bicker, or the older of the two starts to tease. So where can I go? I've got to press on with my writing if I am to make satisfactory progress towards full-time doctoral work come October. I can't really expect them to confine themselves to their bedrooms (I'd work in ours, but all the books are shelved downstairs and there's no floor space to squeeze in a desk/table), or not to make use of the facilities in the home. Child care, if I can get it is sporadic and of a couple of hours duration at the most. Maybe I'll have to start getting up r e a l l y early and start writing before anyone else gets up? Or go to bed in the wee small hours? Unfortunately, my most productive time is in the afternoon: prime argument time, if there's going to be one. It is quite frustrating. And there's another six weeks of it........

Chicken and Egg

I have been pondering the 'three rules' of gestalt therapy and am intrigued by their possible application to data gathering/imposition of theory:

1) Rule of epoche - set aside biases, suspend judgement, expectation and assumption.

2)Rule of description - describe not explain.

3) Rule of horizontalization - each item of description has an equal value or significance.

It is, of course, very tempting to gather evidence that fits your hypothesis and ignore the material that doesn't. Gestalt theory encourages us to let the pattern (hypothesis) emerge from the evidence. But it is very difficult to know what data to gather without having some sort of hypothesis in mind, and having one in mind is a hair's-breadth away from imposing it on the data-pool! Chicken and egg.

I found an amusing quote in Simone de Beauvoir's The Prime of Life that seemed appropriate (and wryly comforting) in the circumstances:

'The fact that we had very little idea what to do with the information we amassed did not make its collection any the less valuable per se.'

Summer Projects

We're really coming to the academic doldrums now, with a goodly proportion of the scholarly community away from their desks for the summer break. I, however, am acutely conscious that I have quite a bit of stuff to consolidate before my change from part-time to full-time doctoral study in October. One project that I must concentrate on over the 'holidays' is the acquisition of some skill in (reading) German, in order to cope with the vast quantities of Pauline scholarship in that language. I seem to remember that this was a thought floating vaguely around my head last summer, which conveniently got forgotten by more pressing business. Now it has become pressing in its own right and I have been looking into taking some sort of crammer course in the autumn. Fortunately the university just over the hill from me (literally: I can walk there in 15 minutes - pity it takes me three hours plus to reach the one where I'm registered!) has an excellent language centre running a course that fits the bill perfectly. My lack of German is a particular source of chagrin as my granny was from Cologne (via Antwerp)....although she died when I was seven, and I don't actually recall her ever speaking her native tongue in my presence. I did do about 2 years of it at school, but didn't enjoy it much and dropped it in favour of physics for o-level. So I must pick up where I left off a LONG time ago! There's a few helpful sites online that I could look at too, but I could really do with an audio course to put on my MP3 player that does not concentrate on ordering food or asking directions. I also intend to re-read the Pauline epistles in their entirety (in Greek) again, just to get them more firmly fixed in my memory, and refresh my rather pathetic Hebrew (i.e. remind myself what the letters sound like). I'd like to think that I could continue with the Aramaic, but I think that I'll have enough on my plate as it is - especially as the children break up in ten days time.