A bit more about Saint Margaret

Y'know, the thing about the study of English Literature, is that the field is pretty damn huge, and people tend to pick periods and trends to specialise in. As an intergenerational note to all the Modernists, Post-Modernists, Post-Structuralists and Post-Colonialists out there, all of whom will find that the books they want to read are either still in print, or in a library in the same city as them - Hah! I sneer in your general direction!

I currently have a loan order in for one of the two microfilms in Australasia of the 1910 reprint of a book first published in 1480(1), and it's a work of criticism on my subject. Not to mention another key reference source published in 68 volumes between 1643 and 1940.

All those people who study books younger than they are - [Yorkshire accent]Luxury!!![/Yorkshire]. Although it's certainly being interesting pushing the limits of what the Vic library service can extract for me...

(1) Mombritius, B. Sanctuarium seu Vitae Sanctorum (Paris, 1910).

I Love the Smell of Interloans in the Morning

So today was my last day at work. For various reasons, this has overlapped with my first week at Varsity, and I've been running around a lot over the last two weeks, both trying to get the last thing I was working on done as far as possible and handed over in good order, and get my courses sorted out. I'm currently working on the Chaucer paper that's continued on from the previous semester, started a course on Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee (at 15-20 students, we're filling out the Honours common room like crazy), and have mostly finished my research proposal for a 489 on St Margaret of Antioch. She got et by a dragon.

Have finished my day by sitting in Cuba Mall for a bit watching people wander round, coming home to cinnamon toast and warm milk with vanilla, and have plans to expedition out to Burgers Wisconsin. Two things are pretty evident about this evening: I'm feeling very deflated and wiped out; I stress eat.

Love to all, etc.

Time Capsule

I've been sorting through old University notes, those dating from the period 1995-1998. I've never been able to bear throwing the physical reminder of all that work away, so they were packed into boxes and have been following me around for the last ten years. I still can't bear to throw them away, but I'd like to squeeze them down to one box so I've been flicking through the files pulling out ephemera - exam papers, assignments, scratch notes, that sort of thing and putting them aside to be recycled. In the process I'm not only glancing at old material and remembering (or not) studying it, but finding old pieces of music, stories I've written, stories other people have written (1), letters, cards and all the bits and pieces you collect.

It's interesting looking back at the person I was then. While there've been some big events between then and now, I think that most of the changes in me as a person were so gradual I didn't really notice them at the time, and I need to look back over a large space of time to see growing up in perspective.

(1) Cat, if by any chance you're missing the originals of your Etherfee Omn stories I have photocopies that you sent me an age ago.

On Being An Unemployed Bum...

This morning I had my last exam, which I think went well, although I was finding that I was pretty tired. (I didn't sleep well last night, for no particularly good reason.) On the other hand, I'm now free, free as a bird (or will be until I find my next job) and it's quite disorientating. I'm thoroughly used to the idea of holidays having set time limits and for there to always be somewhere something that I need to be doing, and someplace that I need to be. Right now, I don't. I haven't been in this position since the first half of the 90s, when I had long hot summer holidays and afternoons of hanging out after school. I'll let you all know how it turns out.

In other news, I hate the Student Health Service with a white hot passion, and will henceforth attempt to fill out the numerous forms that go into applying for aegrotat only if I think I'm dying. It involves lots of fluffing around talking to people who tell you different information and make you hang around their office for ages and come in for multiple appointments in which you say pretty much the same thing all over again, but you have to turn up for the sake of their precious damn forms. Bah! (I had a cold last week for my last exam and applied for an Impaired Performance Certificate. I suspect now that my exam would have gone better if I hadn't been stressed out by all the fluffing around.)

Last Essay.

All done and handed in.

I somehow managed to pick the three hour period of today in which the weather was soaking wet to swim into town to hand it in. I feel that the Gods of Academia are punishing me for my lateness or something. :-(

The Last Class

Today I had my last class as a BA undergraduate. It was oddly anti-climactic, actually, probably because I have some exams to get through before I cease to be a student altogether. Also, I have to work on my Last Essay, which is going to be about Janus, God of the Gates, which epithet I find aesthetically appealing given the timing.

Also today, I finally finished the dreadful Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. It's very highly thought of, and I hate it bitterly. I only kept reading out of bloody-mindedness, and I feel that any book which requires you to read the first three chapters twice, the Introduction and look it up on Wikipedia before you have an idea of what's going on has some essential problems. That, and every now and then I felt like I was reading what the Eye of Argon could have been if Jim Theis had been able to spell. F'r'instance:

Gudrun was as if numbed in her mind by the sense of indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down into the living body of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of the blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure control; a sort of soft white magnetic domination from the loins and thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the mare heavily into unutterable subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000), p113.

Note the use of the word 'loins.' It's Lawrence's favourite word, and I mean favourite, and I'll grant that many men have nice bottoms to look at, but if it's eye candy he's interested in, he could stand to give us a slightly broader view of men's other nice features also. Bah humbug.

First Week Back At Uni

And I've spent enough time on campus to long for the halcyon days of summer when there aren't all those pesky students hanging about getting in the way. It's mainly first years I think, they have things they need to queue for and they get lost easily.

Apart from that things are going well enough. Im having a bit of a problem in Latin right now in that translations are taking ages and I'm not understanding things as well as I want to, which will hopefully come right soon when I get into the right mindset again. Old English is in fact going better than expected - the three week swot before the class started has paid off, and Christine (the lecturer) is really nice. She seems to have given me and the other couple of newbies temporary immunity from being called on in class. I have slightly more news on the Mystery of the Head - other members of the class tell me that it's all in the Life of St Edmund, which they translated last year, so when I get through reading it, I'll update people on the story.

And Alasdair came down from Northland to have lunch with me today. This was something we did practically every week last year, when we were both on campus at the same time. Felt just like home.

Last Exam of the Year is Done.

Phew. Not particularly inspired, but it's done.

And may I say that I find essays on comparative literature very tiring to write, which is what I spent most of ENGL308 doing. It isn't enough to understand an individual text, you have to understand two, or five, and then work out patterns and contrasts amongst them until you think your head's going to explode. I'm beginning to miss the halcyon days of 100 level papers, which I never thought I'd say.

Hark, outside there is blue sky.

No More Exams For Me...

La la la.
(Well, for this term, anyway.)

I also got confirmation of the site that I'm going to study in Greece: Eleusis, otherwise known as that place wot Theseus came from in The King Must Die. I guess I'm going to have to do some more serious reading than an historical adventure novel. ;-) (Although, the lists of sites says that I'm sharing the site, but doesn't say with whom I'm sharing it. Go figure.)

EDIT:
And now I'm back at home having my first cup of tea since 7am this morning. O Tea, how I love thee, let me count the ways...
I spent the afternoon bouncing around the campus (and town) playing Change-Of-Course Hopscotch and making sure that Babe has enough food for while I'm away. On the plus side, this meant some interesting conversations with Robert Easting and Matthew Trundle about a) travelling through Greece and b) what courses are good to take for an easy A. Matthew thought that Salient should run an article on the latter, but declined to comment on his picks for the shortlist. Probably wise of him.

EDIT^2:
Ah, the irony. I was putting off getting changes signed off in the hopes that I'd be accepted into CREW255 and could do it all in one fell swoop. I had to give up on that idea, eventually, because the professor running the Greek Field Trip was complaining about people not setting up their enrolments properly. What just arrived? My acceptance into CREW255. (Which, incidentally, I'm very happy about.)

Existential Angst

So I had this odd feeling yesterday afternoon - "Must Study" which was very weird because I didn't have anything I needed to study for. By some strange plot of the University, two of my courses are now complete - I had final tests for them yesterday morning, a third is virtually complete - the last assignment is going pretty well, and I only have one exam to study for, which isn't for two weeks. So to all those students who are currently rushed off their feet - I feel somehow that I should be one of you, but I'm not, and it was making me jittery.

All better this morning, though. :-)

And now for the news...

1. Babe has ceased to leak, to the relief of us both. Now I can remove all the strategically placed towels that have been protecting the upholstery.
2. I've been back at Varsity for the last three days. It's good to be back, but all of a sudden I'm feeling stupid again, and I'm not loving the crowds.
3. I can now finger spell my name.
4. I got turned down as a group leader for the PASS programme. Bah! For maybe 12 hours of not-very-well-paid work, they sure do give people the run-around.
5. The frisbee game last night was much fun, albeit with an unprecedented number of collisions, falls, near-misses and plain just falling over one's feet. One of the last was me (although since I was scoring a point at the time, I ain't complaining), although the scariest part was when John ran over the girl I was marking and I had to somehow navigate over the pair of them.
6. Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday. Our frisbee team celebrated with pancakes. Is anybody in the team actually a Catholic? Anyway, the pancakes were good, thank you for the idea, John. Now, what to give up for Lent? Smoking?
7. I'm all of a sudden feeling very tired and deflated. There's been a lot of stuff happening lately, and it all seemed to catch up at once. Yesterday's late night is probably not helping any. :-(

Steph

Incongruous Sight For The Day...

So, this morning I went in to the University to pick up some of the texts I'll need for next semester. As I walk out of Student Notes I'm greeted with one of the more unexpected poster ads - not for a book shop, or Student Job Search, or anything study related, no, it's actually a very large picture of an expired condom that's advertising emergency contraception. Now, I suppose as a public health message, fair enough, yet I can't help wondering if whoever sells advertising for the University thinks that students are generally promiscuous, or too ignorant to know what a morning-after pill is, or too stupid to work out how to get one. And hey, it's really important to ask for the right brand, doncherknow.

(By the way, Alasdair, both the bookshop and Student Notes have got a lot of their new stock in, and there isn't a queue in sight.)

Hmmm...

I've been asked to run one of the PASS sessions next trimester for ENGL111. It's like a supplementary tutorial, but run by students that took the course the year before. We're supposed to be less scary or something.

Pros:
1. I'd get to warp naive young minds.
2. It would be teaching experience of a sort.
3. There's Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" which is one of his funnier (and smuttier) offerings. "The Rape of the Lock" was quite fun as well.

Cons:
1. There's Malory's version of King Arthur, which I hated with a white hot passion.
2. The money isn't fantastically great. But then it's only an hour a week, so it's more of a token anyway.

I must think on this.

I just got the nicest comments back from my tutor...

She finally coughed up with my essay (the first copy of which having met with an accident with a shredder), and along with its sequel it was full of really ego-flattering comments like "Splendid", "Marvellous", "Tremendous", one to two pages of typed commentary for both of them, some interesting points on what I had to say, a suggestion that I start reading up on post-colonialism (I'm not sure exactly what post-colonialism is but I think I really ought to check it out, somehow) and finished it all with:

"I hope you'll go on with English - you'll maybe want to do the Post-Colonial theory course - and I hope you'll consider post-graduate study in English? I want to read more of your work."

This is like, amazingly awesome. It's been 6 hours since I read it and I'm still grinning about it.

My Essay Got Shredded ...

... and my tutor still hasn't marked the replacement, despite having had it for a full week.

I like getting feedback. I like someone who knows more than me suggesting how I could have argued my point better, or mentioning other sources that I'd find interesting, or even just telling me what they liked. I'm presumably going to get it back next Wednesday which will make it a full month since I handed the damn thing in in the first place. Man, this is annoying. There's nothing worse than feeling like you're throwing finely crafted words out into empty air. Phooey.

Some People Are Weird...

So I'm sitting in my Children's Fantasy class before the lecture eavesdropping on the conversation behind me (as you do) and these two guys are talking about the fact that they haven't read the set text (Narnia). Ever. One of them thinks he might once sort of have seen a BBC serial of it. This is after two and a half weeks of lectures and tutorials on C. S. Lewis' life, times, and in considerable detail the Chronicles of Narnia and the big question in my mind is: "What the fuck are you two doing in here?"

If you don't care enough about the subject enough to read the books, why are you sitting a course on it in the first place? How do you expect to understand the lectures if you don't know what they're talking about. Even if you're solely motivated by the mark you get at the end of the course how do you expect to pass if you don't read the material? Understand me, this is not a course for teenagers fresh out of high school. To be in it, you need to have passed two 100 level English papers or talked the Dean into giving you an exemption, so these two people must have done some studying in the past. But I just don't get it - you only get one chance at the lectures and then they're gone forever. You only get so much time to cram all that knowledge into your brain. To me sitting around wasting it is ... approaching blasphemy.

I must be moved in, we have had a house warming party...

(Disclaimer: some of this was previously written in a letter to a friend. Hi Donald!)

So after a week of University I feel a need to take stock. I'm liking getting to mooch around in my pyjamas in the morning and very carefully selected tutorial slots to be no earlier than 11am. (Joy.) My cat has finally arrived (see below), the weather has been gorgeous although is today overcast and windy. For the weather I'm blaming Alan who is visiting for the weekend - he must have brought it down with him. Also, we now have a broadband internet connection so I don't have to trek all the way into town to get access to email. (Double joy.)

Last night we had a house warming party so I guess that officially we're moved in. ;-)
Babe finally made the last two hour car journey to Wellington yesterday. She's coping pretty well, although a bit grumpy about not being allowed outside. We went out for a sniff this morning and I accidentally let her get out of sight for a couple of minutes and then found that I couldn't find her - she'd dissapeared into the undergrowth somewhere. After about 5 minutes she turned up again, so I delayed having a heart attack for the moment.

University has been good. I get to read the Chronicles of Narnia as homework (my Gran didn't believe me when I told her), manicly trying to memorise Latin vocabulary, and reading Middle English to Elizabethan love poetry, some of which is extremely smutty. The first couple of art classes were a bit dull, but hopefully they'll liven up a bit. I've also found that there's an SF group and a Gaming group on campus, so I think I shall be wandering up to their events and seeing what they're like.

I'm learning to navigate like a Wellingtonian. That means working out the easiest ways to gain altitude (like crossing the street, going into a building, taking a lift up 2 floors then crossing the street again via an overbridge) and maintaining altitude once you've got it. Unfortunately, the maps don't contain topographical information, so you pretty much have to 'know' the streets in question. However trust me on this one - you do not want to go down into a valley unless you absolutely have to.

Love to all,

Stephanie