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.

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.

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....

Reading German: Part One

Just got back from the first lesson of my Level 2 German Reading Skills course: it was a bit of a shock to the system, I can tell you! The main problem is that there isn't a level 1 reading skills class, which would have been my preferred starting point, but - really - I don't want to have to go through the whole 'which way is the airport/can I buy two beers and a sandwich please'. That would be of no use at all in my quest to acquire a reading knowledge of theological German. I need to be able to read it - speaking it be darned! That having been said, I last did German in earnest about 36 years ago, just before I dropped it in favour of the physics option (why did I do that?) at O-level. I have some familiarity, but not much, so that when the tutor asked us to introduce ourselves and tell a little about ourselves (in German), my mind went blank and I nearly passed out. Fortunately, she is excellent - patient, helpful and very encouraging. My frozen panic subsided a little as she went through the course path and aims and we started with some tense recognition and revision. I am quite lucky in that I know quite a lot about grammar, if not German grammar as such, and can understand the mechanics of it, thanks to many years of Greek and Latin, if not the precise application. So far so good. Most of the class were undergrads - English Lit. students mainly. There was one other mature student - married to a German (as I understood it) - who seemed to have a more than adequate grasp of the language. We completed a few simple exercises: simple for them, I mean, I struggled somewhat and it was only when we moved onto literary appreciation that I started to feel slightly more comfortable. I can read far more than I can speak, and lit.app.is a piece of cake, and a very enjoyable one at that. So, in my favour I have: a very, very rudimentary knowledge of German; a sound grasp of the universal principles of grammar and a feel for literary writing. By the end of the session I'd started to feel more like I could do this rather than dumbstruck horror. We have a little homework and actually, as I look at it, I'm starting to feel quite a bit more positive about the whole experience!

Nose to the Wheel....Shoulder to the Grindstone etc...

Back from uni. and quite inspired on the academic front: it's really good to feel a part of an academic community rather than hovering around on the periphery as I have done for the past couple of years (since I finished my MA, I suppose). My supervisor seems to think that I'm basically heading in the right direction (which is quite heartening) and is urging me to consolidate my random thoughts into some solid doctoral writing. And I wholeheartedly concur: I've identified that (just) one of my personal failings is an inability/unwillingness to pursue a topic, pin it down, wrestle it into submission and tie it up in a pretty bow of words. I'm really good at appropriating research, hounding out papers and digging up references only to let it drift and move onto new areas of interest. I've got to ditch the heavyweight butterfly approach and follow my current topic to its natural conclusion. That being so, I've been tasked to produce 3000 or so words (by our next meeting - in 4 weeks time) tackling the status questionis, specifically the scope of my thesis.
If I consider that I will probably have a total number of seven chapters, and seven terms left until a nominal submission date in 2012, that falls out at one chapter per term - an entirely reasonable rate of work. I've decided that a good way to mentally and physically organise this will be with seven actual 'chapter boxes' (boxfiles) wherein I shall keep all the references, bibliographies, references pertinent to that particular section. This will impose a sense of order as well as a satisfying visual indication of progress. Obviously, some chapters will prove far trickier/time-consuming than others, so I am not going to be too pedantic about it. But at the same time the background reading will be enormous, and it's all too easy to postpone it as 'not really productive' (although it is absolutely essential!) or, conversely, kid oneself that any sort of reading is 'doing work'. So what with that to contend with, plus the German Reading course (starts next month too), the conference circuit (which I'm really looking forward too) and the dreaded papers that I'm expected to present, it is clear that the academic writing is the very tip of the iceberg. It's the bit that showcases everything that underlies it, its consummation if you like. I'm all too aware it's time to buckle down.
(And, since you ask, the campus Starbucks was full of students!!! Can you believe it? Grrr! Couldn't get near the counter.....)

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.

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.

Progress Reviews and Other Stuff

I really, really intended to get around to producing some written work this week. I'm acutely aware, and somewhat uneasy, that I've spent most of the time since my last supervisory meeting reading without getting anything concrete down. It's been fascinating stuff - the Jewish apocalyptic thought, how this mode of expectation appears in the words of JC, and how much Paul was thoroughly of this tradition. I'm hoping that it will give a framework into which Paul's use of language concerning death and resurrection will click nicely. However - best intentions and all that - I never actually got round to committing my thoughts to, I was going to say paper, laptop. The surprise news about my funding necessitated some time online filling in forms and phoning people about filling in forms. Then all of a sudden I received an email telling me that I had to fill a progress review form whose deadline was the next day! I'd previously understood that, as a part-time student I'd not have to bother with this this year as my timescale was double that of the full-time student. Apparently not. Another goodly amount of time form-filling, liasing with my supervisor, drawing up provisional programmes of study - something that hadn't even crossed my mind as I'd been bumbling along. Stuff like this always takes much longer than you think it's going to. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing of emails, it all got sorted in the nick of time. So, no actual work produced. Again. But I'm going to have to get cracking. I noticed that one of my supervisor's comments was that he wanted to see evidence that I was getting to grips with academic German. Ulp! I mean, I've found a website that might be useful, but that's about it at the moment....

There's a lot I should make a point of scheduling in: academic German, more regular Greek reading, brush up on the measly amount of Hebrew that I do know, be more organised in my general reading and note-taking. In brief: Get Serious!

Maybe I should cut down on the blogging, but I not only find it cathartic, but it really does help my writing brain to limber up so that I can put words down more easily. And it is the end of the day now, teatime to be precise, and I have a few moments finally to myself.