Thoughts on a Rainy Day

I'm sitting at my desk peering out at the torrential rain and the bleak windy greyness of October. My latest tranche of work has been dispatched to my supervisor, so I'm trying to decide which text to do a commentary on next, but I keep getting distracted.
I'm restless and rather bored - even surfing the blogs that I regularly read, I am increasingly finding myself thinking "I really CANNOT be bothered to read all this": similarly, I find myself just deleting e-mails with only the minimum of attention. I've been so deeply engrossed in writing my last chapter that this sudden halt before I get the comments back has thrown me out of kilter. I know I've got lots to do, but I'm struggling to find the motivation to pick it up. I'm missing company. My mum (81 years old) has just embarked on a year-long course of botany and horticulture, complete with an end-of-year exam! Woo-hoo! Good for her! - I'd been nagging her to find a new group of friends - younger ones that didn't keep dying off - and this seems to have provided her with just this, plus an intellectual challenge to stimulate the old grey cells.

But, as I was saying to her this morning, I really miss going to lectures and stuff. Just being in an academic environment was tremendous fun, and I was certainly at my happiest when doing my undergraduate degree. There's not much prospect engaging with my current uni in the same way - living over a hundred miles away is not conducive to forming close working relationships within the department, and although I've been encouraged to drop in at any time, I'm really not going to do that unless I have a supervisory meeting or something.
But I do really miss academic company: my family (God love 'em) are lovely, but needy, and my PhD subject so esoteric that I'm just not going to get any feedback from them.

I really think the problem is that PhD students are, by their very natures, loners, and that can end up as lonely. They have generally started of doing a pretty general sort of degree amongst other like-minded souls and have gradually spun off into some weird orbit of their own, focussing on such minority interest topics that - even when surrounded by other scholars in similar fields - they can't find anyone who knows much about what they actually doing. And that's a bit disheartening. It's a bit like hacking your way alone through a dense forest of thornbushes without a map or a light or someone shouting encouraging noises from the distance. Still, we keep plodding on.

I've put my name down for a beginner's level modern Greek course at the local uni-over-the-hill, having decided that it's ridiculous that I can read ancient Greek but couldn't speak to a real Greek person except to ask for beer and souvlaki. Hopefully, I might meet some new faces and - who knows - maybe end up going to the pub occasionally?

New Term, New Energy!

Well....that was a hiatusand a half! I couldn't believe how long it's been since I posted here! After the prolonged wintery weather, the spring and then the summer have passed in a blur of activity.

The thesis is progressing apace, I think. I have moved on from general and theoretical stuff to commentary and it seems infinitely more satisfying to see the word count grow without the feeling that I'm trying to nail clouds to the wall.

I've had August off to recoup and unwind, read for pleasure and generally just troll about, which has been wonderful. The youngest, the Bright-Eyed Boy has made the transition from junior to senior school with only the most minor of wobbles (unfounded worries about PE): I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed that he doesn't suffer any of the anxiety attacks that marred last autumn, although he is away from the dreadful harridan of a teacher that sparked them off in the first place!

Having got them to the bus-stop at just gone half-past seven in the morning, and having walked the dog (who, being a greyhound, is more than happy with a 20 minute stroll), I find that I can realistically sit down at the computer by 8am. I could work solidly until 4.30pm, when they arrive home, but don't think that I'll be mentally up to such a long stretch of concentration immediately. To that end, I have decided to slide into it gradually by immersing myself in scholarly material and in fact, have read an entire book today. Consequently the mental cylinders are starting to fire up and I am starting to feel more enthusiastic and energetic about getting some words down. It did get to the stage, before the holidays, where I was accessing academic websites and thinking that I really couldn't care less about what was written there.

So the new term spreads ahead, and I am looking forward to it with the sort of anticipation that I got when I bought a new pencil case and crayons in my childhood. All good!

Paper Cuts

The ongoing gloomy weather has not been conducive to getting out and about which, in truth, has been a godsend as far as my thesis is concerned. I did postpone, during the snows, my January supervisory meeting partly because of the weather, but more because I hadn't added much to it for weeks. Well, that's not exactly true...I've been putting together a parsed corpus of the Pauline epistles (1 & 2 Corinthians complete, Romans and Galatians underway) and I've read an typed up quotable sections from a key book, but although it amounts to many pages of A4, it doesn't count as original scholarship. I don't think my supervisor would be very impressed if I plonked all that on the desk in front of him! So I've spent most of my time since the New Year revising my first chapter, and damned sick of it I am now.
Since it provides an overview of what I hope to achieve in the rest of the dissertation, it can't be too detailed, but as it sets out the principle arguments, it has to be sufficiently detailed to engage interest and look suitably different from any other piece of work in the same field.
The whole question of 'original scholarship' is fraught with difficulties: I know that swathes of quoted text doesn't count towards your word count (if you get my meaning) but it's necessary to include it to show that you're engaging with the accepted authorities (or indeed mavericks) in your field. But if you are a relatively new researcher it really is difficult, especially in the early stages of the thesis to know exactly what it is that you think about the various issues. To engage too hastily leaves you in danger of closing up your arguments too early and admitting no new influences. I've read a few pieces where the doctoral candidate comes across as an obnoxious know-it-alls who've got a bee in their bonnet and are on the offensive from page one. Not to engage leaves you open to charges of colourlessness and being unconvinced by your hypotheses.

But if you are dealing with world class authorities, surely a little hesitance to engage is both acceptable and understandable? I know, at the moment, how little I know, and the more I read around my subject the more convinced I am that of that fact. It's almost as if I'm going to have to put on a fake cloak of argumentiveness and go into battle under false colours!

The arctic conditions have had the benefit of ensuring that I have not been tempted to go out much recently. Consequently I am romping along and making quite a bit of progress with the thesis. The Christmas holidays, despite my best intentions to do a little work, mostly passed by in a blur of eating, drinking, socialising and sledging. Actually, I'm quite glad they did, because I have returned to work with renewed enthusiasm, having devoted time to family and fun. The German Reading Skills course doesn't start again for a couple of weeks, so that's one distraction less for a while. A turning point came with the arrival in the post of Vygotsky's Thought and Language, which I devoured and then precis'd over a couple of days when the house was relatively empty. This book forms an interesting forerunner to Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Consciousness and Time, which I am using to supply insights into discourse prominence, linking it to focal consciousness. Reading Vygotsky re-enthused me to press on gathering material from Chafe and now it's all moving along nicely.
Another task that fell by the wayside over the past couple of weeks is the parsing of the Pauline epistles that I had planned to do, but I've set aside a portion of the day to make steady, plodding progress. An incremental approach always pays dividends and I have now completed all of 1Corinthians, including picking out verbal textual variants using the NA27 apparatus criticus, and am working my way through 2Corinthians. I contacted my supervisor and asked if I could postpone my supervisory meeting so that I could get back on track and fortunately he didn't have a problem with that. Now I have an extra two and a half weeks to revise my chapter, and I am determined not to squander the time. The bad weather that holds all the UK in thrall will see to that!