Beautiful Beliefs (2)

I believe that...

We can be our own worst enemies.

Some time ago I wrote this post in relation to a student I was teaching in his first year. His enthusiasm and interest remained throughout his time at university, but he suffered from crippling anxiety when it came to assessments. He was given extensions to different deadlines because his anxiety about it not being good enough was so bad that it prevented him from finishing and submitting his work. He got through to the final year, and could not sit his exams or submit his dissertation. I was not supervising him, but have absolutely no doubt that it would have been an excellent piece of work. He was given the opportunity to defer these assessments. He contacted me after I’d left the University in the City where the Castle is also a Prison to ask if he could come to talk to me about one of the units as the exam came around again. I had to reply to tell him I was no longer in the city, but was sure one of the other early modernists would help him. I heard no more from him.

I have been away from this blog for a long time – half-scribbling posts that never got written – so when I came back I read over some of my older posts to remind me what I used to do, and came across that post about him. I emailed my friend, Very Efficient Undergrad Secretary, to ask how he was doing and if he had managed to submit his dissertation this year. She told me that he had decided to withdraw from university at Easter, before any of the assessments took place.

I was genuinely saddened by this news. He had so much potential as a Lit student, and I know he could have finished with a good 2.1 degree, if not a first class one. He was certainly intellectually capable of it. But his lack of self-belief meant that he left the university with no degree at all.

This sort of anxiety – that we are not good enough – is something that most of us suffer from at some point. I have talked about it before in relation to my teaching and marking and in relation to judging ourselves by others’ progress. I think the reason my PhD thesis was submitted at the last minute (literally – a friend had her car engine running to get me to student registry on time from across campus) was because I was reluctant to let it go, to send it out for examination and judgement because it might not be good enough. I am now struggling to turn that thesis into a monograph, not because it was found wanting at my VIVA (it was not), or just because I struggle to find the time (though I do) but because I am, underneath, anxious that it will not be good enough. A journal rejected a chapter of it as an article; will the peer reviewers of my book reject the whole thing?

I have a book contract with a reputable publisher, so the idea has already been deemed publishable, but I procrastinate and delay and try to hunt out any other text I could possibly look at to make sure there is nothing obviously missing from my work.

I will just have to get it done and send it off to them very soon, or I will miss the REF deadline and my new employer, who took a chance on my potential to publish and gave me a job, will not be pleased. But this anxiety I feel at letting them down, although I feel it, is not as strong as the anxiety I feel about sending my work out into the realms of academic criticism. So I delay, and the deadline gets closer and I know I will have to send off work I am not entirely happy with when I run out of time. I tell myself I work better under pressure, but really this is because I can no longer put it off.

I thought that if he had had the right kind of support and encouragement, that anxious student might have got all of his work submitted. I don’t know what sort of support he received beyond the deferral, but I am starting to think that whatever it was it wouldn’t have been enough. I think he’d rather withdraw than risk not meeting expectations (though whose expectations, I am not sure).

It’s tempting, isn’t it, to avoid putting our work ‘out there’. I could do that with this book, but it would be such a waste of my time, effort and energy to prevent myself from going forward because of this anxiety.

There can be many obstacles to overcome in the ‘world outside’. Let’s try hard not to be our own worst enemies.



This is post is connected to Amy Palko's Beautiful Beliefs writing circle.

Making (some) progress

Well, the conference paper on 'new stuff' went reasonably well, although there was very little discussion of my paper after the panel. I suppose if the audience had felt strongly that my reading should be challenged they would have done so, either during questions or afterwards, so I'm taking this as positive. Perhaps the audience were all just tired though.

I ran out of time to write some more 'new stuff' for my second conference in May, but managed to find a section on my thesis to present instead, without looking too much like I'd shoe-horned it in. That conference was an extremely interesting day on one topic, with plenty of time for discussion, and I enjoyed very much being back in the Beautiful Scottish City that I Miss.

Now my plans are to turn the first paper into an article, reasonably quickly. I wanted to carry on with it immediately after the conference, but with exam papers to mark, a further paper to produce and then twelve 4000-word projects to mark, I've sort of lost the momentum. But, my co-organisers have managed to find an avenue for publication of the conference papers as a special edition of a journal, and I'm excited about producing something to publish. Hopefully my writing nerves won't impede me too much.

I might revisit the section taken from my thesis for the second paper to produce an article too, but I might just leave that one in order to develop it when I turn my thesis into a book (book proposal part 2 of summer plan). I also have an article I've been sitting on for nearly twelve months that needs some referencing amendments and that's article no.2 or 3.

So, I feel I'm making progress. Not a lot, but some. And that is better than no progress at all.

Getting back out there...

I am having a major crisis of confidence over a conference paper I am writing.

It's the first piece of new research writing I have done since I submitted my thesis a LONG time ago. My last conference paper was taken from my thesis, so I knew before I went to the conference that that reading of that play has already been 'approved' in a variety of ways. This is new. This is mine. And I haven't had a supervisor read it, or an examiner tell me it's good enough to pass.

I think my paper will be one of the last on the day, and I'm concerned that, after everyone else's, mine will look very thin. There are so many other things I would like to do to it / add to it, but there just isn't space in a 20 minute paper. I'm also worried that I have fallen into 'lecture writing' mode, since lectures are the only things I have researched and written in the last 2-3 years. I work hard on my lectures, to produce informative and critically engaged / engaging material for the students, but I also think that this is a different discipline from research related writing.

I made a deliberate decision to produce something new for this conference, to boost my research self-esteem (when you've produced nothing other than lectures for a few years, you start to wonder if you'll ever be able to get back into it). But at the moment I feel more academically (and professionally) vulnerable than I have felt in a very long time.

I suppose the only real way to overcome this is to expose my paper to the questions and criticisms of the conference delegates and see what happens.

But I admit, I'm a more than a little bit scared.

Seeing differently 1: making your own way

As Christmas and then the new year approaches (one of my students recently said that 2010 sounded scarily futuristic, and she may be right), this is the first of a few posts on seeing differently.

This one began as an email to a friend responding to his Facebook status update on feeling ‘behind’ in comparison to his colleagues.

I wanted to say something comforting in a comment his update but all I could think of was that I am now 2+ yrs post-thesis submission and don't think I will ever ‘catch up’ with some of my friends who have only just finished theirs, and already have a couple of articles, or book chapters and a variety of editing experience. But I realised that this sort of side glancing, side-swiping at ourselves – that others are making better, faster progress – is a normal part of academic life, and we have to find ways not to let it get us so far down that we only see 'failure' when we look at other people, rather than a track along which to progress.

The only way forward is to look forward in our own 'track' and not look sideways at other people's. So I’m adopting a new attitude: what's the next thing *I* can achieve? Finishing my marking is a thing off the 'to do' list (and counts in experience) but isn't a positive goal in my career progress track. So, now I’m aiming to finish an article I was nearly done with in the summer and then sending it to a journal. Voila, article 'under consideration' on my cv. Then on to writing my book proposal. I have written on so many job applications that I am ‘working on’ this, now it’s time to really do it. And not just work on it, but get it done and on its way to an academic press. And then I’m writing a conference paper which I can turn into an article. That will be new research, and I hope it will remind me how much I like my research topics and texts.

I know I can’t do all of this at once. And, yes, I do have to do my marking (about 130-140 essays) over the Christmas holidays. But since I managed to finish a big project this term, along with my heavy teaching commitments, I’m starting to think that I might be able to do it. But I won’t if I keep letting other people’s achievements hold me back. So from now on, in time for the New Year, I’m going to start seeing my work differently.

Writing

I like writing.

I'm not talking about the process of academic writing, although I do like the sense of achievement when a chapter, paper, article or lecture is finished (this does not happen often enough - especially the personal research related ideas there!). I enjoyed writing my PhD thesis, although the final deadline and the re-writing processes immediately before that were not too much fun. What I'm talking about here is actually writing. By hand. With a pen.

On my way to my admin job the other day - I know this sounds strange - I felt an almost overwhelming need to write something. Anything. And I realised how much time I have spent at a computer, or shuffling papers, scribbling quick, untidy, notes or using mini post-its to mark pages relevant to lectures. It's been AGES since I have sat down and written by hand anything longer than a sentence or two, a 'happy birthday, love from me' in a card or a brief phone message scribble. And at work I had to go straight back into scribbling notes, emailing, filing etc.

Today I addressed an envelope in my very best joined up handwriting and I felt strangely pleased. I like how my careful handwriting looks (not wanting to boast too much, it is quite pretty) and it is much more satisfying than typing a letter or an envelope.

Marking undergraduate exam scripts earlier in the summer, I realised how few of them hand-write anything (either that, or the teaching of handwriting in schools has declined since I was taught 'joined up writing' and then allowed to use a fountain pen). I know no one does their best writing under the time-pressured conditions of exams, but still, some were barely legible.

I think the decline of handwriting is very sad. Not that I would do away with the wonders of word processing packages for my academic writing - cut, copy, paste makes drafting so much easier (even if sometimes starting to draft is actually easier for me with a pen and paper). But I am going to start doing more handwriting - letters to friends for example. I think - even in the increasingly computerised world where communication is almost instant through emails and social networking sites - people like to get mail. I know I do. And perhaps that is precisely because it is so rare for people to take time to actually write anything these high-tech, high-speed days.

I don't *think* that was what I said...

After some serious consideration, weighing up how much work it will be and balancing that against making my CV shiny, and generally looking like I know what I'm talking about in the world of early modern literature, I agreed to take over writing the summary of the year's work in renaissance literature studies. Someone I know by association with Supervisor emailed me out of the blue saying he now has post doc funding and his project means he is too busy to do it now, but if I was interested he would suggest me as his successor. It is one of very few times that 'who you know' has actually worked for me. (I say this with some hesitation, knowing how much work I'll have to do in quite a short time, but it will be very shiny on my CV).

The guy who is handing over to me sent me an email saying he'd already sent for some of the books to review, and he would post them on to me, but he would like to keep two of them for his own research. So he suggested two options and asked which I would prefer:

a) He would keep the books, read them, write a short review paragraph for each of them and send that to me to be silently included in my own review

or

b) He will send the books to me, I can read and do my own review and then send those particular ones back.

As much as I was tempted to option a) - less work for me - I decided that I was uncomfortable passing his work off as mine both because I fundamentally object to plagiarism, and because if the comments are going to have my name to them, then I want to have read what 'I' am commenting on. (And you know that the one time anyone asks me about anything I've written, it will be about one of these books that I actually haven't read). So I sent him an email supporting option b), and promising to read those ones first and get them back to him ASAP. I told him I'd be on holiday for a couple of weeks, and asked him not to send anything until after I got back to make sure they don't get lost in being held at the post office. He said that was fine.

Today I got an email telling me he had put the books in the post, and could I let him know when they arrive. [Fine; yes; no problem]. But it also said 'I have kept a few as I mentioned earlier - shall I send you the reviews to add into your piece?'

Erm... I don't think that was what I said. And really, if you'd already decided what you were going to do, why did you even ask?

An Imposter

Earlier this week I went to a large conference of early modernists. It's the first conference at which I've given a paper in a few years, and I was very nervous about it. I know many academics have fears of being revealed as frauds at these things (imposter syndrome) - even if they really do know their stuff - but I've not done much in the way of my own research for quite some time, and I was convinced everyone would be able to tell. I felt like an interloper at this gathering of early modernists. Most of my teaching recently (and research for lectures) has been on topics much more modern.

I sat through the conference, listening to lots of other academics whose paper were clear and impressively constructed. My paper was in the penultimate panel, so I spent much of the conference worrying that my paper wasn't as good, that I'd never be able to answer that sort of question, that I'd forgotten everything I used to know around the topic on which I was speaking (I took the paper from a chapter of my thesis), etc. Thankfully, the paper went well, so I think I got away with it.

I also met someone else who is working on the same parliamentary bill (in a different context) as I discussed in my paper - we plan to share work on this when we have written the articles. I'm planning to, no, going to turn this paper into a journal article. And then I'm going to start on a book proposal based on the thesis and / or a new article from scratch. That way at the next conference, I'll still worry about being exposed as knowing nothing, but I'll at least have some new research to discuss so that I can trick other conference delegates into thinking that I do know something.

New Year Activity

Well, this is my first post of 2009, so I guess the first thing to do is to say "Happy New Year!" to all readers of Falling Leaves. I hope this year brings you health and happiness, in whatever form that might take.

Today is also my birthday, so for me the beginning of January is not just the beginning of a new calendar year, but also a new year in my life. I'm not just making New Year's resolutions for 2009 because that's what people traditionally do at the beginning of the year, but because there are things that I would like to have done before my next birthday (it's a major one - you know, of the kind that end in 0) and I shall have to be organised if I'm going to do them.

So my New Year's resolution is to be more active this year. I don't just mean physically active, although that wouldn't go amiss. I mean active in a more general sense. Below is a list of what I intend to do. These are not my resolutions; they are the means to achieving my one resolution.

1) I will manage my time better.

2) I will do more research (to be honest, it will not be hard to do more of this than last year) - this will make me more research active, and I will be taking more positive action towards getting a permanent job.

3) I will arrange to meet up with my friends more often. This will stop me talking passively over the internet / text messages, and will help me not to spend my evenings inactively on facebook.

4) I will listen to more music. More can be accomplished when listening to CDs / radio than when watching television.

5) I will find a Yoga class so that I can be active and still at the same time. Yoga also makes me feel physically and mentally better, so I'm hoping that it will contribute to a more positive outlook to help me achieve other things. And adding more activities into my life-timetable will mean I have to be better at time management.

That brings me back to the beginning of the list. And it seems to be enough to be getting on with for now!

May 2009 bring all you wish for, and good luck in sticking to your own resolutions!

State of perpetual finger-crossing.

Reading September Blue's post on academic glass cleaning, I entirely sympathise / empathise. Finding motivation to do any research this summer whilst not really being attached to any academic institution has been nigh impossible for me.

I have also spent a fair amount of time completing job applications for Institutions several of which not only did not short-list me (fair enough) but did not even bother to reply to my application (I know this is standard practice, but that notwithstanding, it is still very rude, and unnecessary in the modern world of inexpensive email communication). I also put a tremendous amount of work into a funding application which in the end I could not submit because of a variety of problems with the electronic submission system. That did not fill me with inspiration to continue with such fellowship applications. And the sense of being set adrift this summer has hardly been motivational.

That said, my colleagues at the University in the City Where the Castle is also a Prison have been very supportive and encouraging. And I have never been sufficiently down or hopeless about all this to give up on academia as a career path. I have a friend whose academic CV is shinier than mine who is thinking of giving up; her work is excellent and innovative, and I hope she reconsiders. I do understand her frustration though. I try to be positive about the job market picking up, and continue to hope that something will come up for me, but some days it is very hard to keep up that sort of optimism. Some days the effort to stay optimistic takes all the energy I can muster, and that doesn't give me much enthusiasm for research. In fact, it leads mostly to watching box set DVDs of American TV shows.

I have been offered some TA work for this academic year. On the plus side, this will keep me attached to an Institution, return my library borrowing rights, give me a shared office space on campus, and, I don't have to move house and try to half-settle on a short term contract again somewhere else. On the other hand, it will not cover even half of my monthly rent, it will not pay the electricity bill (which I am told by letter today has just gone up), or feed me and the Little Dog for the next twelve months. So I need to find an alternative source of income, that hopefully will not take up so much time that I can't make research progress (which is an advantage of not having full time teaching).

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Again.

Still.

Reading suggestions?

I spend a fair amount of time on buses. And bus travelling time is the time I now use to read non research related literature.

My bus books include some my favourite series of novels set in the Napoleonic Wars and some books that I bought a long time ago to read 'just for fun' and didn't get around to. But I want to start interspering these 'for fun' reads with 'proper' literary reads. Books that any self-respecting literature academic ought to have read. I've just finished reading Orwell's 1984 as part of this drive to be a better rounded lit. person. The novel actually made me feel physically ill in parts, but, it is something that most people would think I would or should have read by now.

So now I'm looking for suggestions. Novels or collections of short stories that Autumn Song with a PhD in Literature who is hoping for a career in academia ought to have read / ought to read. Failing that, any book that you think is absolutely worth the read, whether it's an academic must or not. Any period, any author. Please leave suggestions in the comments...

Cut Adrift

I went to my graduation ceremony in the last week of June. I can now officially call myself Dr Autumn Song, and am slowly but steadily changing information so that my mail comes addressed to Dr Song. Hurray!

Graduation day was lovely, the ceremony wasn't too long, and several of my PhD peers graduated at the same time. I was a little disappointed that most of them didn't hang around for very long, though; I wanted some group photos! (If any of you are reading this - you know who you are - consider yourselves told off...) I can't blame them too much though - the department did forget to let us know that they were having a party for their graduates...

So, I have now officially left the university in the Beautiful Scottish City that I Miss. I am still, of course, emotionally attached to it. I have friends who still live around the uni, and of course, friends and former colleagues in the department. But officially, I have no reason to be there. And just to make sure I know it, my network username has been deleted; my email access has been cut off. I remember asking about this some time ago, and I was sent an email telling me I would be given notice before this happened. I wasn't. And I can't prove that I was told that, because I can't get into my emails. Clever, eh?

As of July 1st, I am also unemployed. My contract at the university in the City where the Castle is also a Prison ended at the end of June. Fortunately, my computer access is still active and, they tell me, will continue to be so for a couple of months. We shall see. I did, however, have to clear my office and surrender my key, and my library card ceased to be valid at the end of my contract. I now finally have time to get on with my own research, and don't really have the facilities with which to do it. I believe I can join the library as an external reader. This means I can borrow three books at any one time, and for this privilege I have to pay £60 for the year. Sixty pounds.


"Congratulations on your graduation. Get out."

"Thank you for your help teaching our undergraduates. Please don't now do any work here that we can't use to our advantage / for our ratings."


I'm feeling decidedly cut adrift...

Flashbacks?

Today I had to re-open the thesis.

I have to fix the typos and print off the version to be bound and submitted before the university will let me graduate. I didn't think it would be difficult. I didn't think it would be stressful.

But it is.

Suddenly I find myself terrified that the computer will crash and it will eat a whole chapter. Or worse, when I move it into one document to create a pdf file, I will lose all of it. I do have back-up copies of all the chapters , but they are on the university network in the Beautiful Scottish City that I Miss. I don't have time to go and get them. I should have done these corrections ages ago, and then there would have been no rush. But a couple of months ago I thought that there was no rush.

Perhaps I'm finding this so difficult because an impending thesis deadline - one which makes a difference to when / if I graduate, despite the fact I have passed the VIVA - reminds me of thesis submission day. I did not have fun. It wasn't a triumphant moment. It was hurried, and stressful and exhausting. And I don't remember it fondly. I don't think I ever will. And another hurried print out and submission - and this time I have to travel some distance to take it where it needs to be and present it in three different formats - does not fill me with joy.

So, I'll hit save every time I change anything. And I'll pay the extra to have the bindery turn it around quickly so I can take it to the Beautiful Scottish City that I Miss in plenty of time. And I'll ask the IT people for help creating the pdf document. Hopefully, they will know what they are doing.

This time I'm hoping for a happier memory of thesis submission. Fingers crossed.

The news in brief. Or not so brief...

Well, it's been quite a week (and it's only Tuesday!). Really, I mean in a 7 days sort of way...

Today at 2pm I gave a lecture I finished writing at 1pm and taught a class 1-2pm. Cutting it a bit fine, eh?

Yesterday I gave a lecture I finished last Friday. Had I finished it on Wednesday according to the original plan which, as ever, was foiled by my inability to decide when enough reading is enough, or force myself to sit and write things before the matter becomes urgent, I could have finished today's lecture before today. I say I could have, but well, see the stuff about sticking to plans I just said...

And last week was mid term reading week. I'm very glad I wasn't teaching then.

Tomorrow, I'm having one of my classes observed. I'm so tired from the seemingly unrelenting lecture prep I've been doing for a week (immediately after finishing the marking I've been doing for ... ever???) that I can't even think about tomorrow's class. Let's hope the students in that class come with their best 'enquiring minds' and are trying to help me out. Some of them will. They are bright students, who enjoy lively discussion and usually come prepared. Some of them, however, don't like me ever since I drew attention to the fact that I knew that when they were supposed to be doing group work they were actually talking about how to excuse yourself from seminar absences (I swear I heard, 'Well, when you look at it, you've got 4 grandparents' come out of one of their mouths - in the middle of a seminar, when they were supposed to be doing something else and I hadn't left the room. Come on boys, use your brains, just a little bit).

This weekend Sees Through the Eyes of Children and I are going to a school reunion. It seems that there will, this year, be more people there that we might know. Maybe a post on this at a later date.

The weekend after that I have an interview for a post doc job down south. Way down South. Hey, I'm trying to get back up North! This was not the plan.

I forgot to publicly congratulate Aspiring Author on his new job. Well done. This is not 'news' so much any more, but I don't want to miss him out.

Needs Buckets More Confidence has also just got a permanent teaching job at a place she wants to be. I'm so very very pleased for her too. Hopefully this will start to give you the Buckets More Confidence that you need.

I have signed up to an internet provider for the New Flat. Hopefully will be connected in the next week or so. I am looking forward to that with some excitement. I might then post more frequently. Who knows? That way, I wouldn't have to try to squeeze all news into one hurried post...

Punctuation

The semi-colon is a wonderful punctuation mark; sadly, it is much misused.

Frogs

That's what it said down the side of a poem in one of my anthologies.

I was writing a lecture on a poem I'd studied in detail on my MLitt course, on which I had written a note to myself at the time. Frogs.

On re-reading it, I had no idea what it meant. I thought maybe it was just a random scribble in a margin. Sometimes I do that - a thought comes to me, someone asks me to do something, etc. and I write it down in pencil on the closest paper thing handy. This could have been a message from my past that had lost its significance now.

But no. I have carefully joined it to a word in a line of poetry with a line and a circle. Frogs are important. They mean something. I wouldn't randomly write frogs and connect it to a line of poetry. So I went looking to see if I could find the poem elsewhere in my collection of poetry anthologies - maybe one of those, with better footnotes, would tell me.

I found one. And it did. But I'm not telling you what it meant.

I like the idea of frogs in the margin.

Avoidance tactics...

Like September Blue, I'm having my VIVA soon. Very soon (under a fortnight, in fact). And I'm worried.

I mean, my supervisor did not read the final version of all the chapters. I'm not even sure if he read the final version of any of the chapters. The thesis was finished in a hurry - so hurried that I actually don't know what my conclusion says.

I do know that the thesis has some items missing from the bibliography. And a page of abbreviations missing from the front. And I have barely opened it since I submitted it. I dread to think what little cringe-worthy gems of stupidity I'll find when I actually read it.

And that, I think, is why I have spent most of today saying I'm going to do some work, but not actually doing any. That could be why I'm here, posting, now. My family is watching Christmas present DVDs in the living room, because that's what you do in the Christmas holidays. But I am not, because I have work to do, and to watch DVDs is to deliberately not work.

To sit next to one's thesis, blogging and worrying, well.... it's not work, but it's closer than animated movies...

You'll thank me later...

Yesterday, I had a very productive day in the National Library of Scotland. It's a wonderful place to work (particularly when it isn't too busy) and it has an amazing atmosphere of scholarship and interest. You can feel the academic vibes...

Sadly the enthusiasm I had for work yesterday when I was finding interesting things to think about is somewhat lost today now I have to get back to my chapter re-writing. I can see it's worth it - what I've done so far is much better than the other draft - but utter panic is now setting in. And we all know, panic is not productive, so I'm trying to keep it at bay with camomile tea.

The most worrying thing I've found about my previous work, though, is how bad my quotations are. I thought I was being careful at the time, but looking at them now, it seems not. Early PhD me did not quote accurately. And now she's wasting a lot of my time because I have to double check everything - I no longer trust her to have done anything right (thus contributing to my panic).

Most final stage PhDs would like to go back and tell our younger PhD selves where we're going with this, to find the focus earlier (although I have enjoyed the journey of finding out exactly what I'm doing, so maybe I wouldn't spoil that for her). I'd like to go back and tell mine, "Do this properly. You may think I'm nagging now, but you will thank me later". So, any early stage researchers reading this - quote carefully and accurately in your drafts. Double check them at the time (I thought I had, so maybe triple check). You may think that I'm nagging now, but you will thank me later...

"When you've got them down on the mat...

... stand on their fingers". This was the instruction Supervisor gave me at our meeting yesterday. I had very politely suggested in a chapter of my thesis that an established critic had misquoted a text and this was what made his argument work.

Supervisor: What you're saying is, he's misrepresented the text to fit his argument, isn't it?

Autumn Song: [hesitantly] Yes, I suppose so.

Supervisor: Well just say that then. When you've got them down on the mat, stand on their fingers. He would do it to you.


Well, yes, I guess he probably would. But still, it makes me slightly uncomfortable to suggest such a thing about those better qualified than myself. Nevertheless, it seems to be true (see, there it is again, a reluctance to make this claim) - it is true - he misquoted, deliberately or not, and for that reason amongst others his interpretation is unsatisfactory and I disagree with his argument. And rather like the world at large, if we all agreed on everything, life would be very dull. Still, in all such situations, I'd suggest rational conversation rather than standing on fingers. That isn't nice.

'A baggage for all gamesters'?

Here is a brief passage from Act V of John Ford's The Ladies Triall (1638), a play that I'm currently writing about in my thesis. Martino finds his niece Levidolche with Benatzi, a man that he does not know she has already married (Benatzi is actually her first husband in disguise whom she marries a second time - she has, since first marrying him, been seduced and abandoned by one man and rejected by another, and been staying with her uncle since). Martino lets loose this tirade against her:

Oh thou monster
Thou she-confusion! are you growne so rampant,
That from a privat wanton thou proclaimst thy selfe
A baggage for all gamesters, Lords or Gentlemen,
Strangers, or home-spun yeoman, foot-posts, pages,
Rorers or hangmen, hey day, set up shop,
And then cry a market open, toot, and welcome.


They don't write rants like that these days! Although sometimes, as a fellow Teaching Assistant just pointed out to me, undergraduate essays (critical and creative writing) come frighteningly close...

(Lest you think Ford is the misogynist this quotation might imply, I have to defend him by saying that the play actually attempts to knock down some of the contemporary cultural and social assumptions about gender and sexual misconduct upon which Martino's outburst is based.)

Levels of good - 2

I forgot 'quite good' the other day. Any suggestions for where 'quite good' might fit into my list?

(This wasn't Supervisor's overall judgement of the introduction - it was a discussion that didn't involve any of my levels of good. It seems we're working under a different scheme now, and nobody told me what that is...)