Just the Way I Work and Am.

Am starting to suspect that I am, if not bonkers, then certainly a bit bi-polar (how very trendy!). Looking back over my blog posts for all my blogs (how manic is that?), I seem to be either full of energy and ideas or dragging my sorry ass through the mud, predicting (or at least fearing) gloom and disaster. How dull for all. Still, at least I can get to grips with the fact that if I'm down, it won't get too bad (I am fortunately spared the depths of despair suffered by some poor souls), and I'll soon feel perkier and more energetic.

I seem to have got myself into that silly situation again where I'm counting the days down to my next supervisory meeting and am fighting to get the word-count up. I blame the extended school holidays that have punctuated April and thoroughly disrupted my schedule.
I've realised that I just can't work with anyone else in the house, so that kind of rules out evenings and weekends, despite my best intentions (and the 'satellite study' that I set up in the bedroom).
I'm coming to realise that my working conditions are quite specific: I need total concentration and a looming deadline. This rather contradicts my early-PhD dreams, of endless sunny days reading and making notes, followed by a relaxed and focussed session of writing up.

Nope, my doctoral studies are turning out to be an assortment of panicked pages, sweaty nightmares and pangs of anxiety. And do you know - I'm actually producing some reasonable stuff.....!

Permission to Tread the Primrose Path

Well, I got there in the end and submitted (with surprisingly little angst in the end) virtually 10,000 words to my supervisor. Attending the supervisory yeasterday, I was relieved and pleased that he seemed to like what I'd written. Furthermore, a secret fear that I'd been harbouring for a while that my work was spiralling away from the original brief was put to rest when it was suggested that I state that my approach 'could not be seen in isolation and was part of a wider exegetical toolbox'. Massive relief, because I thought that I might be heading off too far down the etymological primrose path, but as my supervisor said "You can do anything as long as you state in advance that you're going to do it." To be honest, I felt a weight lifting from my shoulders, and this lightening has seen me today at my desk, humming happily, and setting to with a renewed sense of enthusiasm.

Bleeurrgh!

Boy, my mind is just not working today: I've been sitting at my desk since before 8 this morning and still haven't cracked the 8,000 word barrier.
It's like - I don't know - stringing sand today (I can't even think of a decent simile!). I find I'm struggling to keep all the words under control, forgetting stuff I wrote, forgetting references, keep finding myself slack-jawed and staring vacantly with my mind skittering off to some random unrelated track.
I'm blaming the fact I woke up at 4am this morning, heart pounding (we had a splendid family meal out yesterday with a fair - though hardly excessive - amount of red wine) and feeling deeply anxious, worrying about my thesis and where it's going and generally being plagued by those bodily aches and pains thar make one imagine all sorts of terminal scenarios. I didn't get back to sleep, but that's not unusual.
I think I'm a bit stressed, though why I'm feeling it now when I'm just about getting on top of my word-count I don't know.
Could be because I got an email about the mandatory progress review form and, looking at the box titled 'doctoral development'realised I've done chuff-all in the way of the stupid little courses they just lurve to see on such things. I hardly going to travel all the way to campus for two hours on Powerpoint presentations: my 11 year-old told me all I needed to know on that score.
Could be because I have now realised (thanks Prof. Brian Cox) that I am just a bag of atoms sailing on the way to the heat-death of our universe.
Could be because I have been reading Seneca's Moral Epistles, which tell me I have to accept such things with equanimity. Great.
I'm going to take a break now and get some lunch - my blood sugar does feel quite low - and possibly walk the dog.
Hopefully, I feel a bit more enthused and positive and a bit less moronic and jaded when I return.

Smokin' Mouse Zombie

I've had to put in some solid desk-work since my trip to the Ancient Languages Taster Day at Liverpool a couple of weeks ago. To tell the truth, I've been procrastinating a bit since my last supervisory meeting at the end of January - not deliberately, but I had to spend some time preparing my presentation for the off-campus Study Day, and then I'd had two days away the week following that. I wanted to get into some good exercise habits since I've been paying a hefty wad of money for gym membership since the beginning of January, so I've been making the effort to get down there first thing in the morning, when the kids leave for school at around half-seven. Eight weeks on, it's pretty much part of the morning routine: I get my swimsuit on under my training clothes and pack my dry stuff, towels, shower gel etc. into a big bag and walk to the sports centre. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays (when I go with the Husband in the afternoon) I spend about half-an-hour in the gym itself working on a split training routine (chest/triceps, shoulders/biceps, back and abs) and then swim for twenty minutes followed by ten minutes in the sauna or steam room. Mondays, Wednesdays, occasionally Fridays and Sundays, I'll swim for forty minutes. Then I'll shower and walk home, via the shop to pick up any supplies we need. Usually I am sitting down at my desk by 9.30-45, feeling pretty good (all those endorphins!) and ready to put in some good study time. The times I've not been able to swim first thing I've spent the rest of the day feeling a bit seedy. I guess it's addictive. Pleasingly, I feel a lot more energetic, and my jeans are getting pretty baggy round the middle.
Anyhoo - when I was last down on campus for my supervisory meeting I'd blithely promised 10,000 words of work for the next meeting which was, in retrospect a bit optimistic. I'd not really factored in my days away, or the fact that one of the weeks was half term. Now the two youngest (11 and 13) are really good and don't mind amusing themselves while I work away in my satellite study in the bedroom upstairs, but by Wednesday afternoon I was feeling a bit sorry for the Bright-Eyed Boy who, unlike his sister who has her rowing to go to and a boyfriend(!), was spending unconscionable amounts of time on XBox live shooting the legs of zombies.
Even HE was bored of it! So I downed mouse and took him into town for a browse and a hot chocolate. Twice. In two days, so I sort of lost the impetus and the 714 words I'd had to commit to writing per day (I can't remember the sum it was 10,000 divided by the number of days available to do it, minus some stuff I'd written already) failed to materialise. I know that isn't a particularly high target word-wise, but it's NOT the writing-up that takes the time as any PhD student kno: it's the reading, assembling and reviewing of arguments, the cross-referencing, quotations, sourcing out-of-print books and articles and deciphering cryptic references in Victorian commentaries that takes the time!
It makes you break out into a cold sweat when you get to three in the afternoon and you've only put a couple of hundred words down BUT YOU'VE ACTUALLY BEEN BUSY EVERY MINUTE! I've had a couple of nights waking up at four or five am with some anxiety issues, sweating, heart pounding and certain that, come my viva, I'll be unmasked as a charlatan and a fraud.
Of course once you fail to make one day's word-count, the deficit is shunted over to be divided up and added to the remaining days' allotment....and of course it's a compound daily deficit, so every day I have a higher target and...o well, you get the idea! Now that the new half-term has started, I'm making a big push with the chapter and I am managing....just....to keep my head above water, and I may not submit exactly the 10,000 I airily promised but -hey! - I AM trying my hardest!

Pan Boiling on the Hob

Had a great day on Friday at the 'Ancient Languages Taster Day' at the University of Liverpool on Friday. Got there slightly late as the train decided it had to terminate at Manchester Piccadilly rather than continue on to Liverpool Lime Street, which meant an annoying unscheduled half-hour wait until a connecting train could make up the rest of the journey. Arriving at last, I jumped into a taxi and managed to miss only the first few minutes of the Hieroglyphics lecture. After coffee (during which I got chatting to two other mature students) we continued with Sumerian/Akkadian and after lunch I sat in on the talk on Coptic. After a valedictory glass of wine, I walked back down to the town centre, calling in at the RC cathedral and a fabulous bookshop called (I think) Reid's Up the Hill (very much like Shakespeare & Co in Paris, an identification that the owner seemed to like very much indeed!). Once I got over my initial and habitual unease of being out and about, I enjoyed the whole day very much indeed and decided I should really tackle learning Coptic. Having some Greek seemed to make it quite feasible, so I've got a book from Amazon Coptic in 20 Lessons to get me started. As usual, it will be a bit of a problem fitting it in: I generally manage to over-schedule my day, and I've already decided that I need to revisit the consciousness studies and their applicability to linguistics. God knows when I'm going to fit it all in! I find micro-managment the best way - divide the day into 15 minute slots so that at any given moment I can cram in some vocabulary or the reading of a specific article.
However, today has been reasonably successful thus far: by 8.30am I had fed the dog, put on a load of washing and cooked tonight's ragu sauce for the pasta (a big pot of it that can be transformed into pastitsio or lasagne and chilli for two other meals) and was in the pool at the gym where I swam for half an hour and steamed for ten minutes. I washed my hair in the showers, so that's done, and called in at the shops on the way home to pick up salad-y stuff and croissants. At home I turned the laptop on (in my 'satellite' study, in the bedroom, because it's half-term), hung up the laundry, put the guinea-pig out in his hutch, sorted the recycling for putting out and made a skinny latte and grabbed a croissant. I managed to sit down at the computer by half-ten, but various annoying admin tasks (freeing up disk-space in my uni email allotment) meant that I actually didn't get down to work until eleven. I put in a good couple of hours before lunch - I've learnt that I cannot function efficiently without regular food - and after walking the dog, another good couple of hours. It was a bit bitty today, and I didn't quite manage the golden 714 words required.
I spent a lot of time chasing up a reference to a fragmentary piece of text by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus which apparently only exists embedded in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, and generally rooting through various etymologies but, all in all, I stopped at a good place to stop, with some reasonable writing under my belt for the day. Tomorrow, I'll probably be equally late in starting as I think that Daughter #2 and the Bouncing Bubba intend meeting me for a coffee after my gym (shoulders and biceps) and swim session.
I decided I'd got a taste for the workshop thing and booked myself on a 'digital researcher' day at Durham just before the Classical Association Conference kicks off. I haven't really looked at train times yet, but I'm guessing it'll be another very early start!

Tea shortly after finishing this post, and there's my Tai Chi class at 7pm.
I had strongly considered kicking this last thing into touch but -hey! - what else'd I be doing. Actually, I'd be watching University Challenge and then The Beauty of Books on BBC4 at nine, but I'll set the recorder.
So when I'm going to fit in some Coptic is anyone's guess...or do some academic reading! Although I do have half an hour before I need to get the pasta on so......

Back in the Saddle

This week, I have been inspired by my attendance at the Digital Researcher event at the British Library in London to dust off my academic blog and get down to some serious reflection (although this will be more of a panoramic catch-up).

I note that my last post was somewhat less than enthusiastic about the whole doctoral process, but I think I can put that down to a rather general air of gloom that can seize me as the days get shorter.

Things are moving on apace, as they are inclined to, even given a curmudgeonly outlook.
Christmas was surprisingly excellent, and I was surprised (and delighted) to receive a Kindle reader from the Husband. Turns out that not only can I get digital reading matter for it (no more Waterstone's 3-for-2 offers for me!) but it can store my PDFs on it! Now, PDFs are the bane of my life as I think I have mentioned before, cluttering up my laptop in digital form and desk in hard copy. Using a simple drag-and-drop action when the Kindle is attached via USB, I am gradually rationalising them into logical collections. Fab!

I delivered a short paper introducing my research at a study-day seminar last week, which was held off-campus at the Old Templars' Hall at Bolsall just south of Birmingham. the timing meant that I had to travel down from York the night before, but I stayed at the University of Birmingham Conference Park Hotel at Lucas house on Edgbaston Park Road. This was, pathetically, a bit of a daunting prospect as I haven't actually spent a night away from my family (except for producing them!) in years! I must say I felt a bit anxious on the train down and thinking about it, should have arranged to have arrived before it got dark. My thinking was that I'd still be around when the kids got home from school and then leave at teatime.
As it happened, they weren't terribly bothered (the Husband had promised them a Pizza Hut pizza) and I just felt like I been hanging around all day waiting to set off. I wasn't in the mood to do any writing up, so concentrated on getting my Powerpoint right and rationalising some prompt-notes, but that didn't take very long at all. Arriving at New Street Station, I decided to take a taxi to the hotel rather than negotiate the branch-line train and a walk down a rather dark tree-lined road. Consequently, I got to my room just before nine pm and was pleasantly surprised by the accomodation - simple but comfortable - although the hotel appeared to be a maze of corridors and right-angle turns. Turning in early, I drank tea (eeuw! - Millac Maid UHT milk), ate some 85% choc and watched Big Fat Gypsy Weddings ( the Husband would not be impressed).

The breakfast was generous, but I limited myself to three courses(!) and headed off to the minibus pick-up point. All went reasonable well, I think, although no doubt I would be horrified by my performance had I been captured on video. I ended up doing that thing at the end when you read from the slides (only the last two though!) because you've lost your train of thought. Still (feedback says) I appeared relaxed and confident. I did make the effort to stand up and move round a bit and it felt quite good, if not entirely convincing. The rest of the day was sociable and enjoyable, including a trip back to campus via Tolkien's old haunts.

Last Monday, as mentioned, saw me at the Digital Researcher event at the BL's conference centre. Early start: the 6.30 train from York to King's Cross, a quick catch-up with London-based Daughter #1 in the St Pancras Pret-a-Manger and round the corner to register and log-on to the facility's network. Things initially threatened to go tits-up as the system didn't seem to want anyone to get online with it and it sulked by going very slowly. Eventually it was sorted out and we had some workshops and a plenary talk before lunch (including being charged with the group-task of producing some reflections on the day to give to the participants later on in the afternoon. After lunch it was a workshop session of choice (I chose Social Citation and Bookmarking), tea and then reassemble to cobble together our piece which took the form of a Blogger blog. The day finished with a talk on the pros and cons of digital research and researchability and finally a welcome glass of wine in the bar. The train back to York was the non-stopping one (save for Doncaster) so I was back home in less than two hours - which is far swifter than the stinky CrossCountry train from Brum, and was altogether a nicer train experience (more leg-room and frequent at-seat service).

I've been trying to fit a reasonable amount of exercise around my studies since Christmas (honestly, my pastry-eating and laziness was getting beyond a joke!) so I've been popping to the gym (ten minutes walk away) and swimming first thing in the morning before I start work on the computer. This has been quite invigorating mentally, but I do feel quite physically tired and sometimes I wonder if I can keep it up (the exercise, not the doctorate). Still, I shall -nay, must! - persist until I see some good results.

Unfortunately, I overestimated how long I had to knock out the 10,000 words I breezily promised my supervisor for our next meeting.
I thought that we had agreed to meet on March 26th, but looking in my diary realise that in fact, the date we eventually arrived at (he had a meeting on the 26th) was the 17th!
Not only had I lost a working week, but next week is half-term which usually seriously compromises my work intentions! I worked out that I had to write 714 words a day to hit the target, but the research that has to be done just eats up the hours available. It's all quite fine-grained stuff at the moment (linguistic and exegetical commentary work) and almost every word has to be minutely looked into, and its usage and nuance examined in depth.
I am trying to be focussed, but things keep cropping up and distracting me. Like I had to re-organise my train ticket for tomorrow (I'm off to the Ancient Languages Taster Day at the University of Liverpool - another cross-country odyssey) because I realised I'd booked on one an hour later than I intended (which would get there way too late).
And books keep arriving from Amazon: I've decided I need to reinvigorate my reading into consciousness, so I'm trying to read some new stuff in the field; Domasio, Rose, and Searle on language. I think I'll take one on the train tomorrow, but I find train-reading doesn't lead to in-depth assimilation. Hey ho! The life of a doctoral researcher! At least I'm back in the academic blog-saddle!

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!

Chrissymas

Am now drifting glassy-eyed and circling the black academic sink-hole that is Christmas. Despite my best intentions I still haven't managed to tackle my supervisor's comments concerning my thesis chapter. But I have decided to wait - for the sake of the family - until at least Christmas and Boxing Day are over for that and content myself instead with some background reading during the periphery of the day. I am tackling a revised and expanded edition of Lev Vygotsky's Thought and Language which is absolutely fascinating. He critiques Piaget's hypothesis that children's language moves from personal ('autistic') speech towards the communicative and social and offers his own view that, as speech is primarily about the communication of need, it starts as social and ends up as inner locution. 'Egocentric speech' (speech to oneself) instead of being, as Piaget suggested, a half-way house in the process of the externalisation of the child's language, emerges rather - according to Vygotsky - when 'the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behaviour to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions'.
I can kid myself that this may be useful! It probably will not be, but at least I feel that I am maintaining a toe-hold in the academic process.

Not too far down the Primrose Path...

Bwahahaha! The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but at least the German reading skills grammar test is now out of the way, so I can concentrate on the task in hand.
So how am i doing? Well, generally I have managed to sit down at my desk at around the 9.30am mark, having delivered the Boy to school and made myself the obligatory espresso. Don't always manage to start work straight away though....
I did do the German revision though, and hopefully this has paid dividends: I certainly felt pretty confident during the assignment today.
I have to hold my hands up concerning my marked up chapter....it requires me to spend some hours at a stretch to address my supervisor's comments.....
I have finished parsing 1Corinthians, and have just started on 2Corinthians: plenty to go at over the Christmas break! (...and then onto Romans...)
Haven't managed to fit in much Greek translation: must do better!
Two hours of secondary reading? What was I thinking? Bit ambitious for every day, I think. Still, I'm fitting in a goodly bit when I wake up extra-early because of insomnia! Grrr!
So overall, not too bad. I also spent a bit of time reorganising and tidying my 'satellite' study in advance of the school holidays. Huzzah.
So: I'm hoping to look over my chapter in the very near future and clarify some paragraphs, introduce some more extensive quotations from scholars ("..you don't like quoting big chunks of text, do you?" Er, no, that seems like cheating to me...) and tidy up some generalisations and focus more on my study questions; carry on parsing (ooh er! Matron!) and read, as and when possible. Bibliography to follow....Translation may be done more by reading practice rather than more formally, in order to build up speed. I've got a new Greek New Testament on order from the Book Depository, so I can leave my trusty old NA27 as my working copy, and save the pristine new one for reading.

Working Schedule

I have finally turned the corner after a couple of weeks of assorted illnesses and issues that have rather absorbed my time and halted progress on my chapter. It hasn't been helped by the distraction that is the German reading skills course (enjoyable as it would be if I didn't have so much to do), more specifically a looming grammar test in class next week, which makes up part of the course's overall assessment. I managed to get 70% in the translation/literary appreciation assignment, so I'm hoping that that will make up for any deficiency in the grammar section! I must stop competing with myself on this one - it matters not a jot how I do in this module, I just have to be seen to be doing it!!! Absolute madness, this training needs business. So why am I wasting time blogging if I have so much to do? So I can monitor myself: here's my commitment.

i) Start work every morning by 9.30 latest

ii) One hour of German grammar revision, primarily tense forms.

iii) Read through my supervisor's comments on my last tranche of work, consider his suggestions and apply if appropriate.

iv) Parse the remaining chapter of 1 Corinthians and then move onto 2 Corinthians (ongoing over holidays at a rate of at least 1hour per day except Christmas, and possibly Boxing, Day.

v) Note and consider variant verb forms in 1Corinthians.

vi) Try to undertake a regular session of Greek translation, tentatively scheduled at three times a week.

vii) Two hours reading of secondary literature per day, and work on assembling an annotated bibliography.

There! Now it's in print it feels more organised and possible! Fingers crossed that I manage to avoid the nasty cold currently circulating the household.....

OK...let's get going....Will try and keep a daily update on progress.

The worm is feeling a little worthless today, seasonably SAD and a bit sleep deprived. I went down to uni yesterday for the second time in a week. This doesn't sound much unless you remember that I live in York and the university where I am registered as a doctoral candidate is in Birmingham. I was a bit knackered before I left, as one of the children has started having debilitating anxiety attacks, mostly to do with school. We've tried pretty much everything, and the school has been marvellously tolerant and supportive but it's pretty hard to deal with an incoherently hysterical child through the night and then be on the ball studies-wise. With my marvellous husband-and-family safety-net in place, I made my way to the Midlands, if somewhat uneasily.
The department is a little odd to say the least, looking like a 1970's old folks home set amid gloomy pinetrees and dankly dripping foliage, up a little pointlessly meandering mossy path. The blinds are always drawn and the carpets ruckled. It definitely feels a little....odd. All it needs is the solemn ticking of a pendulum clock, or a childish voice singing a nursery rhyme unseen in the distance to make it the set of a psychological thriller/horror story.

Anyway - my supervisor is a most pleasant person, and massively knowledgeable. So much so that I am constantly faced with my own ignorance. And not a little overwhelmed by the whole process. I am trying so hard to be competent and punctilious about doing what I should, but am not at all sure about my progress. It would appear that I am doing OK - that's what the supervisory reports say - but sometimes I feel that it's all a bit beyond me, that I am a fraud and it's going to become obvious to everyone that I know next to nothing about the subject that is supposedly my speciality. Everyone is much cleverer than me, and can probably smell a false premise and a flawed argument as soon as I walk in the room. It's probably got something to do with the fact that I am unable to devote myself 24/7 to the academic process and in addition to feeling a pretty inadequate and helpless parent at the moment, I'm feeling an inadequate student too.

Roll on the Christmas break: I really need to recharge the batteries.

Box ticking and the like

I've managed to squeeze out my German Reading Skills assignment today: translations of 2 Berthold Brecht poems and a 500 word literary commentary on each. I've been deferring doing it so that I can make some solid progress on my chapters before next week's supervisory meeting, but with hand-in at tomorrow's session I could procrastinate no longer. The stupid thing is that I've actually started to care about doing well in something that is a relatively unimportant supplement to my main studies. I only need to improve my German so that I can read the poxy but abundant secondary literature in the field of Pauline studies. I resent the time it takes up, but need to tick the box on my training needs programme. Likewise, a two-hour presentation skills 'workshop' will entail two three-hour trips down to uni and back. Basically, a whole day used up (never mind the expense) so that I can tick a box. And I spent an entire day at a very dull conference (on a Saturday, for crying out loud) for the same reason. This can't be right, can it? The whole system has become so obsessed with measurable targets and learning outcomes and investing in students that the whole ethos of research - actually doing the research is being dangerously undermined by the pursuit of demonstrable objectives. If I'm spending less time on my doctoral studies in order to fulfil these peripheral goals - and my time is pretty constrained at the best of times - then the main body of my PhD will suffer. No argument. Forty hours a week (full-time study) minus the twelve or so hours spent on peripherals does NOT add up to a satisfactory week's output.

The Bubble

I think one on the most difficult things about doing a PhD the way I'm doing it (a hundred plus miles from the campus) is the sense of isolation. But not just the sense of isolation from my department colleagues, but a sense of isolation from almost everyone that I come into contact with on a day-to-day basis. My family are great (in that they have realistic expectations about what sort of tea will make it to the table and whether socks come in pairs anymore: I'm 'on-site' when it comes to that sort of stuff, so it would be perverse to wait for others to do it) but it is just not fair to buttonhole them with an assessment of, say, how Jewish Paul the apostle really was, or how Jesus is always written of as physically making the first move in a clause and what verbs are involved. So I don't tend to. The husband will make a reasonably convincing attempt at interest and comprehension (and he is excellent at spotting a false premise or typo) but it's difficult to give him the sort of background knowledge (in a nutshell) to an argument that I've spent the last four or so years accumulating. So I confine myself to generalities. My parents (into their eighties) do show an interest, but have to keep asking me what it is I'm doing exactly. My parents-in-law (just into their sixties) show no interest at all. When I tell them I've been 'working', they never ask 'what doing?' I think they'd prefer it if I worked in Spar or an office or something, then they'd feel comfortable asking questions about my daily round. As it is, there's just an uninterested silence. I'm presuming it's uninterested - wouldn't you ask if you were the slightest bit curious? God knows what they think I do all day! Self-flagellating? Running a crack-den? The children are just lovely but still think that I'm vaguely Classics-based. So nothing doing there. I do have a couple of post-grad friends, but no-one that I see on a regular basis. So my thoughts just end up going around and around in my head like flies trapped in a jam-jar.

And to tell the truth, I don't mind too much. I've always been a bit of a hermit: give me a good book and a glass of wine and I'm happy. And since these studies are what I've chosen to do, and enjoy doing, I can happily spend all day picking through texts and assembling thoughts. Occasionally though, I get the sort of feeling that I imagine horses getting when confronted with a jump they just don't wish to take: gut-based refusal. I have to snap my laptop shut and run off, usually into town for a well-earned latte and a bun.

Hello?

I spent ten minutes or so last night tackling a blog of a certain persuasion that had posted a translation of a portion of a Pauline epistle that contained a number of blatantly biased interpolations i.e. words had been added to the base Greek text to form a value-judgement that simply were not in the original (it was a quote from The Message bible). I've noticed before that this blog has a very conservative worldview and the contributors by-and-large clap each other on the back and tend to end up agreeing amongst themselves. I guess I was putting my head into the lion's jaws, but I get very, very annoyed by the casual skewing of scriptural texts to present an agendum/world-view that reflects that of the translator NOT the 'author'. I always look at the original Greek text (OK - I admit that the word 'original' is fraught with difficulty: we don't actually have any biblical texts that come straight from the author's pen/mouth/amanuensis/best mate ['autographs', as they're known]; the oldest copies that we have are probably appreciably later than the 1st century CE, and have probably undergone numerous alterations in the interim. When I say 'original', I mean the text that has been assembled by biblical scholars as the nearest to the 'autograph': also contentious yada yada yada...) and see what is there. Only then can we try to think about what it means (not 'what we want it to mean' or 'what we think it should say' or 'what the author really meant, given what we clever moderns know about his context').
So when I see a biblical translation that is, by the mildest judgement, wildly inventive or, by the most critical judgement, wilfully misleading, (this poster actually admitted he doesn't read Greek: how could he uphold any particular translation?), I feel aggrieved on behalf of the original text. So I made my point and, with the exception of one other poster, I might as well have textually invisible! I have read before that this particular blog doesn't really welcome posts from women - I think we're probably supposed to be raising the young 'uns or patching clothes in the kitchen or something* - so I shouldn't have been entirely surprised. However, I had nodded towards the problem of the subjective/objective genitive ('the faithfulness of Christ' versus 'faith in Christ...yawn...unsolvable dichotomy) in my post. Lo and behold, a subsequent poster raised this very issue as if I hadn't, and was treated to a fulsome reply by one of the blog-hosts. Hello? Hello? And people wonder why there aren't more women bibliobloggers!

* my own bit of blatantly biased interpolation.

Tuesday, and it's Goethe.

Fortunately, this week, due to notes being plastered all over the house and well-intentioned texts from daughter #2, I not only remembered - but also attended - the German Reading Skills class. And I really enjoyed it. The tutor has devised a pretty agreeable mix of grammar (all basic stuff, I'm pleased to say) with literary appreciation. The initial tranche of work tackled this morning consisted of reviewing three translations of Rilke's poem Der Panther, discussing the merits of literal v. dynamic translation, alliteration, rhyme schemes, enjambement and the like. I have to say I felt quite at ease with this sort of thing and it scarcely made any difference that my knowledge of German is rather limited. We then tackled the pluperfect tense (das Plusquamperfekt) and attempted a few sentences. Fortunately, it's all quite bolt-together stuff, so not too terrifying. Then on to an examination of the text of Goethe's Erlkonig poem, working in pairs, dissecting the language, working out the subtext, looking at imagery etc. All good fun, but other than gaining a familiarity with the written German language, I'm not really sure it's going to pay dividends when it comes to tackling Theological German. Never mind! I am presently enjoying it to the extent that I'm actually considering (given that I pass my year-end assessment) continuing onto the next level, where the study is devoted to the works of Goethe all year. And as I have to pay for it myself, I might end up looking at it as an indulgence, something that I'm doing because I enjoy language for its own sake - not merely because it gives me another skill-setto put on my training needs form.

It's been quite hard getting back in to the swing of things since the half-term break, during which we spent a couple of days in Barcelona. It's amazing just how tiring travel can be - not just the getting there and the navigating our way around a strange city - but the rather more subtle strain of understanding foreign language, transport and mores, just having to be fully alert at all times. I generally sleep like a dead thing when I return from a trip: I guess I just have to recharge the batteries! Monday was also a write-off as it was my birthday, so I had to be generally sociable, which was quite nice. Actually, there was no way I was going to do any work, but I did feel slightly uneasy that - once again - time was slipping away from me. I started again in earnest on Tuesday, but somehow (horror of horrors!) it completely slipped my memory that I had a German Reading Skills tutorial in the morning. Not good! The rest of the week was pretty productive though and I've managed to put together some pretty cogent thoughts on 'authorial intent' and 'reader response' - not that it forms a big part of my thesis, I just have to address them as valid concerns. The chapter is looking pretty reasonable now, so I'm trying to look ahead to the next one in which I'll attempt a survey of ancient opinion on Paul's writings. Actually, not too ancient, as the first person who has a substantial amount to say about the apostle (as opposed to just quoting his words) is Augustine of Hippo who was around in latter half of the 4th, early 5th century CE. I'm finding Augustine increasingly fascinating: he had some pretty interesting stuff to say about language and signs (as later did Thomas Aquinas), prefiguring Locke's conceptions by nearly 1400 years! In fact the whole of the north of Africa, from Alexandria to Carthage, was a hotbed of religious intellectual activity in the early hundreds and a number of the fathers of the church, including Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen and Clement hailed from that part of that continent.
Augustine was of Berber descent, son of a pagan father and devout Christian mother (Monica, latterly Saint Monica). He initially had no religious calling at all, maintaining a concubine and the son he had by her until he got turned onto philosophy. He embraced, by turn, Manichaeism, academic Skepticism and neo-Platonism before undergoing a conversion experience that saw his baptism, along with that of his son, Adeodatus. His ferocious intellect and copious writings ensured that it was a spiral to the top of the church tree from then on. Sadly his concubine - actually two concubines (plus a fiancee) - were forgotten about in the surge of his new pious existence, which seems to have only got of the ground once his libido started to decline in his forties....

Bloody Computers!!!!

I am incredibly annoyed! Having reset my password, as suggested by the IT department, to a 'stronger' one, I find myself now unable to log-in to any of the university facilities. And, yes, I did make a note of it so that I'd get it right, and check the caps lock.....only now it doesn't want to work at all! I tried resetting again, but I think that the security is 'suspicious' of my activity, and my frenzied attempts to access my email has been interpreted as an act of hacking or something, as my account has been temporarily disabled. Grrrr! I was just trying to be efficient and security conscious, too. Should have left it as it was, and the stupid thing is that I kind of knew that something like this would happen. Nothing to do with computers is ever easy, and even as I entered my new, improved password, I was thinking to myself that it would all go horribly awry and that I should leave well alone. Bugger. Now I'll have to wait until tomorrow to ring eHelpdesk. I'm not entirely sure that the identity checking bit of it is actually working properly...it did seem incredibly slow, so my new password is probably trapped in its constipated bowels somewhere....dammit!!!!