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.