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.

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.

September Already?

Bit of a bad sign really.....I opened the latest publication of the Philological Society ('The Semantic Predecessors of Need in the History of English c.750-1710') and went "Tsk!" and decided that I couldn't be bothered to read it. Oh dear! My brain seems to have atrophied significantly over the summer break: I've noticed an aversion to anything academic that I really need to overcome, especially since I'm moving to full time doctoral studies at the start of October and my supervisory meeting is in less than two weeks time. Deep breath: try not to look at the pile of unread books in every corner of the room, the PDFs crowding the desktop of the computer, the notes that make scant sense after four weeks up on blocks! The summer holiday was great - just what was needed - but now I must get back down to work again, and that means getting back into a routine. Come Monday - this Monday coming - everything should be back to 'normal' (whatever that is!): children back at school, daughter #2 married, Melvyn Bragg back on Radio 4 (oh no....that's Thursday) as well as Paxman sneering away on University Challenge (yeah - I'd sneer if I had the answers in front of me). All will be right with the world and I shall turn to the appropriate page in my diary and smooth it down before jotting down a quick plan of action. I've got a text book on reading German to have a serious look at before I start on the course in late October, plus a number of things that need a good read-through to re-orientate myself thesis-wise. Need to have a look at iReaders (or whatever) too: ink cartridges are too expensive to keep printing off material where only the smallest bit is relevant, plus once PDFs are consigned to the Box of Darkness, I forget what I've got and where it is! The academic year stretches before me......I feel about twelve years old!

I feel an almost physical aversion to work at the moment, a sort of gut-grabbing shudder, a squirming desire to RUN OFF. I think I need a break: a total break: two weeks off and not even think about my thesis. Hols are only a very short while away, so I think that what I'll do is this: Read through my current chapter; note down what I intend to do when I come back to it; read the Searle on Chomsky PDF; look for an overview of Functional Grammar; download it in PDF format to print-off and read; do one more basic German instalment tonight and then back up the hard-drive and not look at my stuff again until I get back from abroad. And try not to let my mind stray back onto it for TWO WHOLE WEEKS. Sorted.

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.

Not Much Progress

I seem to be scuffling about a lot and the moment and not producing very much written stuff. This is starting to worry me a bit as it's less than a month until my next supervisory meeting and I haven't actually added to my word count at all in about six weeks! In my defence, I think I'm approaching it from the 'read first then write' angle, rather than the 'write on the hoof' one. I'm hoping to read and inwardly digest Albert Schweizer's Mysticism of Paul The Apostle and then weave some ideas into my work. It's a fascinating book. one of those that when you read it you think 'Ah! I can see how that works!' It is, however, an old work so I'll have to read up on his critics to get some balance into my arguments.
The most tricky thing about doctoral study is to get away from the 5000 word mindset - that is, imagine that I can read, sum up and dispose of an argument in a short space of time. The PhD timescale is so much longer and the thesis so much more complex and lengthy that it really does have to be approached one step at a time, working through the texts and not trying to have a result in mind before you've done the analysis: let the theory emerge from the evidence, not force the evidence to fit a preconceived notion! Very tricky!