Unstuffed

It has to be said that, while I’ve run quite a few half marathons and even a marathon in my time, there are occasions when I have quite the affinity for Newton’s First Law. Today was one of those days. When I got home, I collapsed on the couch with no intention of further movement. I had overdressed for work (merino dress and boots) because it was freezing and grim this morning. Then the office was too damned hot and the weather improved, so by the time I got home I was feeling all headachey and stuffy. The temptation was to stay right where I was on the couch and take a nap, but I’m proud to say I levered myself off it and went for an evening walk.

Mahoe - the wax-eyes and kereru go crazy for the berries!

No matter how many times I fight inertia and win, it always surprises me how much of a reboot a decent walk gives me. It was a perfect spring evening. The sun had come out and the air was cool but not cold, with just the tiniest breeze. I went up the bush track that starts at the end of my street where it winds to a dead end. The mahoe and kawakawa are going crazy with spring growth at the moment and the kiokio and spleenwort are dripping with new, bright green fronds. The track winds back and forth on itself up the hillside and between the trees the earth is studded with great granite boulders that give the whole thing a very sculptural look. At various spots along the track, people have built dolmens and little rock seats where you can sit and look out across the valley at the ridgeline opposite. 

We don’t have any chateaux or palaces in this country, but my track still has a few things to recommend it for a history buff. On the front side of the hill, facing the harbour, there are the remains of a quarry where, back in the nineteenth century, Maori labourers hacked out the rock used to construct some of the neo-Gothic monuments of colonial government. Slightly off to the side of another, less frequented, track, is a somewhat mysterious tunnel dug partway into the hill. This was thought to have been dug in an attempt at  gold mining, but an explosion killed one of the miners and it was abandoned. It’s said to be haunted by the worker’s ghost. I love a good spook story but I did manage to freak myself out a bit last winter when I was up there during a storm and decided to go and have a look inside it. It was only midday but the clouds were hunkered right down on the hillside (it sits at about 400m) and the mizzling rain made it look like a scene from an antipodean Hound of the Baskervilles. As a friend of mine once told me, I’m the only person who can scare myself witless with something I’ve made up! (Ask me about Pigman…)

Anyway, I’m glad I actually made the effort to get off my bum because I feel loads better now. I’m in the thick of a bunch of research/writing projects at the moment (PhD proposal, article revisions, conference paper…) and I sometimes end up sitting at this desk for hours at a stretch without even realising it. I’m really trying to get a bit more balance and get outside a few times a day, either for a long walk like tonight’s one or even just into the garden for 15 or 20 minutes of weed-whacking and tree-wrangling. I keep a list in a desktop calendar of all the things I want to get done on each of these projects each week (paper calendar – Moleskin actually, with a week per two pages) and then keep track of the time spent in half hourly blocks. To my generally somewhat chaotic self, this seems frighteningly well organised but so far it is working to keep  all my projects moving along at a steady rate (avoiding the temptation to spend all my time on the easy/enjoyable tasks and avoid the crappy ones).  It also helps me to see that even during weeks when I think I’ve done squat, I’ve actually accomplished some things. I’ve now added exercise to the list, mostly walking at the moment but trying to work in running a few days a week as well. (My days of running six days a week are behind me, though!) From what I can gather, this problem of balancing intensive reading/writing/desk work with the need to move seems to be pretty common amongst grad students and academics. 

What about you? Do you have trouble striking a balance? How do you fit exercise into your daily routine? Share your wisdom before the couch beats me again!

Saxon England at the Olympics

I'm watching the Olympics coverage of the equestrian three-day event (recorded, as it was on in the middle of the night NZ time). It's one of the few events where New Zealand actually has some realistic hope of winning a medal, but the thing I'm enjoying most is the course! They have really pushed the boat out when it comes to designing cool-looking jumps. There is the 'Ancient Marketplace', complete with what looks like giant Roman amphorae and a very cute stuffed goat; the Tower of London, which is basically the playhouse of my dreams; and 'Over the Moon', a crescent moon on the top of a hill overlooking the city.


But my favourite feature is the 'Saxon Village'. Every time I hear the commentator mentioning it, I get this mental picture of an evil Norman knight riding his horse over a bunch of grovelling English peasants! I realise this picture is probably wildly inaccurate and you early medievalists will be bewailing my ignorance, but clearly I have seen too many dodgy Hollywood movies. (Also, it seems the organisers have no respect for Saxon culture either, because from what I can make out, the 'village' consists of a few piles of stone and what may be a midden...)


* Edited to add: Maybe I was a bit harsh about the little Saxon house. It actually has a red tiled (!?) roof.

While I was sleeping...

Well, not actually sleeping. More like agonising over a literature review (why is it that you ALWAYS find five articles that totally change your thinking just when you think you’ve finally nailed it??), trying to figure out if I can produce something worthwhile for the SMFS graduate student essay competition (my supervisor is very enthused about this), and getting to grips with oral history. The latter is a requirement of my last taught postgrad paper, in historical methodology. If you want to work in any kind of professional history job in this country (and there are actually quite a few, given the whole Treaty of Waitangi claims industry), it seems you need to understand the theory and methodologies of oral history. For pretty obvious reasons, it’s not relevant to my interests in medieval history, but it’s kind of fun all the same. My efforts to come up with the most interesting project for the least amount of effort have me interviewing a few friends of my partner on their experiences of ‘coming of age’ as a male in the 1980s. Not as frivolous as it sounds, because it was a period that saw big shifts in the experience of ‘manhood’ in NZ, including the challenges posed to the entrenched rugby-racing-beer culture by the huge Springbok tour protests, and the bitterly-contested passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act.

Not posting here for ages turned out to be a kind of an unintended social experiment. Everything I’ve written so far was just sitting there, waiting to be read or not read, as the case may be. I figured that with no new material, I’d probably just disappear into digital oblivion. Not quite, as it turns out. One thing that happened was the last post I happened to write, on cross-dressing, took on a bit of a life of its own, even getting linked from I Blame the Patriarchy, one of my favourite blogs ever. (Though I’ve never yet had the guts to comment there. Like the best lovers, it scares, amuses and stimulates me all at the same time.)

In other news, we’ve been watching the HBO series Carnivale on DVD. I’m a great movie lover, but in many ways I prefer series, because they get the chance to really develop complex characters and plot lines. Deadwood is probably one of my favourite entertainment experiences ever (though to be fair, I’ve had a bit of a thing for Ian McShane ever since Lovejoy). Carnivale hooked me in pretty quickly with its nasty 1930s travelling show aesthetic (reminds me of all those sinister small-town ‘museums’ we used to drive past on our trips to South Carolina or Florida when I was a kid). I love all the allusions to Gnosticism and Templar myths (cheesy as they may be - though not quite to Dan Brown proportions). But overall, this series is not quite doing it for me at the moment. It’s almost like the writers have tried to cram too much mystical weirdness in there, at the expense of a really strong central narrative drive.

So, this was a bit of a random catch-all, just to let you know I’m still here. I can’t promise to be a better poster in future, because I know I’m the kind of person who tends to be totally passionate about things for a brief period of time, and then entirely loses interest. It’s terribly flighty, but at this point in my life, I’ve accepted that it's who I am. I just make the most of the passion when it strikes. Thanks to all of you who’ve still been commenting, even on the old posts. I’m still reading your blogs, and I’ll be back to commenting soon.

Seven things...

Having been given the hard word by Good (Enough) Woman, and with no further ado, here are seven things you wouldn’t know about me from reading my blog...

1. I’m a bit of a science nerd, and have two-thirds of a BSc degree in Exercise Science. A few years ago, I considered a career change to the sports science field, but after doing some personal training I discovered I had no patience for lazy whiners the clients.

2. Though I’m currently owned by two cats, I’ve also had dogs in the past. I always snort disdainfully at those clueless dog-owners on television programmes like It’s Me or the Dog, and say things like “I would never have allowed my dogs to behave like that!” But the truth is that one of them, in particular, was a right little scallywag despite his many obedience club certificates. My son once had to go to school and tell the teacher that yes, the dog really had eaten his homework.

3. I used to be a kickass belly dancer. I still think that my regular dancing gigs at private functions and at the local Turkish restaurant were the easiest dosh I ever made (and always in cold, hard cash).

4. I’m anxious about climate change but at the same time, I can’t shake my penchant for classic American muscle cars. I’ve owned various cars over the years (mostly squeaky Japanese sports cars) but the darling of them all was a royal blue 1965 Ford Mustang.

5. Like GEW, I’m a headbanger from way back. The first record I ever bought with my own money (yes, it was all vinyl back then kiddies!) was AC/DC’s Back in Black (and it’s still on my iPod today). Generally, I preferred the dirty and vaguely menacing products of Britain’s industrial wastelands (Black Sabbath, Judas Priest) to the shiny LA hair bands. Van Halen excepted.

6. The first time I went to university (straight out of school), I majored in Anthropology and Religious Studies. I had no clue what I wanted to do with a degree and picked these subjects mainly because they sounded interesting and my friends were doing them.

7. I’m a dreadful hoarder of books and papers, and also very lazy about tidying. This lethal combination means that my study is now so stuffed with crap, I can barely get in the door. However, instead of clearing it out and organising it, I’ve simply moved all my work-in-progress piles to the dining room table.

ETA: Oh wait. You might have guessed about number 5 from reading this post.

I'm cheating on my first love with Russian

I’ve been learning French for several years, and I adore the language. I’ve grown to really like my classmates and a number of us have now been through four or five terms together. We’ve fallen into a happy routine of taking turns to bring the wine each week and laughing over it as we confess our latest vocabulary faux pas. It’s possible I may even have developed a leetle, tiny girl-crush on my teacher, a beautiful and charming lass of French Indochine heritage and strange musical tastes. She once played us the Jacques Brel song Ne me quitte pas and was perplexed that we thought it a cheesy old load of nonsense with weird stalkerish undertones.

But this term, I’m cheating on my first love because I’ve finally found a night class in Russian. I’ve had a strange yearning to learn Russian for years. Recently, it became almost overwhelming as a result of watching this fascinating BBC series, in which Jonathan Dimbleby spends 18 weeks travelling from Murmansk to Vladivostok. I know very little about Russia, apart from the corners of its history I traversed in the course of an undergraduate paper on the Napoleonic Wars. Also, some odds and ends about Catherine the Great, although I never fell for the story that she was crushed to death while trying to have sex with a stallion (this is one of those scurrilous myths that often get attached to powerful women, and despite all evidence to the contrary, never seem to die).

I imagine all Russians to be like Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, all smouldering gangland staunchness and chewy Russian consonants. Either that, or like the icily elegant socialites Dimbleby meets in St Petersburg, who dismiss Western democracy and American consumer culture with a disdainful wrinkling of their White Russian noses. I’ve never been to Russia but a visit to the Hermitage Museum is definitely on my list of things to do before I die. That, and swilling French champagne in the Baroque dining room of some decaying St Petersburg hotel that’s seen better days.

Oy. I just had a look at the Hermitage website. The Cyrillic script is utterly mystifying. At least with French, you’re on somewhat familiar territory, even if the particular letter combinations and the accents create different spoken sounds from English. It’s just occurred to me how much of a challenge it’s going to be to learn this entirely new alphabet - like learning to read all over again!

Image: The almost impossibly fairytale-like Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg (eat your heart out, Walt Disney). Apparently, it got this rather gruesome moniker care of being the site of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination.

Flames of justice

Occasionally (very occasionally), the contract corporate communications work I do part-time intersects with my true love, which is of course studying history. Such a serendipitous cross-over happened just recently, as I’ve been writing some case studies for a company involved in upgrading the technology in a number of New Zealand’s historic courtrooms.

I was tracking down some background on the Old High Court building, which has now been incorporated into a brand spanking new Supreme Court complex, when I came across this little gem from the Supreme Court’s Conservation Report. It’s the tale of one Sir Hubert Ostler, a future Crown Solicitor and Crown Prosecutor. In 1910, Sir Hubert was a new appointee to the Crown Law Office and worked in a room above the court, but his career could well have been snuffed out by this little misjudgment:

“My desk was near the window and I generally worked with the window open. One day I was concentrating on some work and as I read I lit my pipe, shook the match and thinking it was out, dropped it into the wastepaper basket, which happened to be fairly full. But the match had not been extinguished, and presently I heard a noise and on looking round found a merry fire, the paper being well alight.

I promptly picked up the basket and dropped it out of the window and on looking out to watch the result I saw it descend on the head of Mr Justice Cooper, who had just emerged from the door. There was no time to warn him. It landed on his hat and blazing papers were shot out and showered around him like a Greek fire. He let out a yell and jumped liked a frightened horse…” [1]

The archaeologists have done some major excavating work on the construction site for the new Supreme Court, which lies next to the Old High Court building. This land was originally part of the harbour but was reclaimed in stages from the 1850s to provide some much-needed flat building space between the water and the steep, bush-covered hills. Archaeological finds on the Supreme Court site have encompassed both indigenous artefacts such as Maori kete (baskets, which were possibly used for bringing goods to trade with the colonists) and the prosaic leavings of daily life in the European settler community. The latter includes china fragments, wine goblets, gin and beer bottles, pharmaceutical bottles, and a rather beautiful Belle Epoque-style cold cream container.

Below is a Wellington City Council map showing the harbour reclamations and their dates superimposed on modern Wellington. Much of what is now the CBD is within the green area of reclaimed land. This is an interesting prospect considering this city is smack in the middle of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a zone at high risk of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. I try very hard not to think about that - and about the fact that the scientists keep warning us we’re well overdue for ‘the big one’ - when I’m up on the 25th floor of some waterside high rise and a tremor hits.

Writing about the court’s conservation reports has reminded me I must track down a friendly local archaeologist to help me identify a few bits and pieces that were unearthed under our 1890s cottage when the drains were replaced recently. They include a couple of lead soldiers (?? - I think they’d be lead, if they are indeed from around the turn of last century) and some interesting old glass bottles.

1. The full story is published in R. Cooke (Ed.), Portrait of a Profession: The Centennial Book of the New Zealand Law Society, Reed, 1969.

Summer of research, ridin' and relaxin'

Spring has come late to these parts, and today was one of the first days there was real heat in the sun. I sat on the front porch reading, enveloped in the scents from the jasmine and climbing roses that are running riot around the balcony, watching the fat, furry bumbler bees (as my nephew calls them) slip dozily from bloom to bloom. My coursework is done for the year, so I now have the summer ahead of me to mull over the research project that will occupy a lot of my time over the coming year.

I’ve got some broad ideas about what I want to tackle and how, but I haven’t refined the research question(s) so narrowly yet as to require really intensive reading (or to get alternately obsessed and fed up with the subject). I’m interested in taking up Joan Scott’s challenge to examine the ways that ‘gender constructs politics and politics constructs gender’, so I’m thinking I may do something around competing constructions of misrule and the gendering of dissent during the troubled reign of Richard II of England. That leads to lots of related threads - starting with that classic late medieval triangle of heresy, sodomy and treason - that could also prove rich avenues for investigation.

I love this stage of the process, where I can dip in and out of lots of different books and articles, following up any little obscure angle that intrigues me. It suits my magpie brain. I have a nice big stack of background reading, theory, and secondary sources on the period to work through over the next couple of months, and I’ll also be making a start on tracking down primary sources I may want to use. There is a huge amount of this material for Richard’s reign and its post-deposition aftermath, including a bunch of French and English chronicles and extensive judicial and administrative records. (Bonus - thanks to the prompt from Dame Eleanor Hull, I also discovered my university library has an edition of the Calendar of Patent Rolls for Richard II’s reign stashed in offsite storage, so I won’t need to interloan.)

As this project takes shape over the coming months, I will probably torture you periodically with oblique accounts of my discoveries. But for now, I’m going to go and pour myself a glass of cider, so I’ll leave you with my thoughts on other good things about summer:

• Monteiths Crushed Apple Cider served over ice in a big goblet
• Hitting the single track at Makara Peak
• Eating fish and chips on the beach, and washing away the salty, greasy goodness with a glass of crispy sauvignon blanc
• Swimming twilight laps around Oriental Bay fountain
• Breaking out the fairy lights and turning our patio into a Greek-taverna-by-proxy

To those of you facing down winter in unkindly climes, I send my commiserations.

* The image is of a 14th century music manuscript of the English round Sumer is i-cumen in.

Inside my brain

Check this out. It’s a Wordle, a graphical representation of this blog showing which words get used the most and relative relationships between different terms. You can basically consider it as a picture of what may be going on inside my brain at any given moment (or at least the stuff that’s fit for public consumption).


I like the quirkily appropriate way some of the associations are working here. Note, for example, the bundle ‘political violence state’ in the upper left quadrant, and at bottom left, ‘Christians bad’ (this is how I felt when the door-to-door Catholics recently came calling while I was studying for my final exam). At top right, we have ‘analysis pain’ and ‘connect better’, which I could read as either a set of instructions to myself or a whimper of despair, depending on how my research is going. And in the middle, the ‘Times Muslims experience’ sounds like I’m advertising an odd sort of son-et-lumière show.

I don’t know if I should thank Jliedl or curse her for the link, given the time I’ve frittered away playing with this toy over the last week or so. Meanwhile, someone more insightful than I am has been considering the Wordle as teaching tool and gateway drug to textual analysis. Over at Muhlberger’s Early History, some unexpected results were obtained by running the text of Geoffroi de Charny’s 14th century book of questions on war through the Wordle generator. Muhlberger notes, ‘I am not surprised that "Charny" and "arms" are big; but I am rather taken aback by the size of "prisoner" and the near invisibility of "knight."’

I might try this out on some of my corporate clients. It would be a great way of hammering home the point I’m always trying to make, which is that they spend way, WAY too much time talking about themselves.

ETA a correction to the name of the Charny text.

There's an Aussie in my soup

I’ve just realised I missed posting anything for the entire month of August. It’s partly because I was just too damned busy at the start of the month finishing off some projects before I could go on holiday for three weeks. I’ve been in the beautiful South Island town of Wanaka, enjoying some great skiing and snowboarding and a lot of excellent Otago pinot noir and pinot gris.

The only problem this year is the very noticeable infestation (I know I shouldn’t put it like that, but I can’t really think of a better term) of Australians. Kevin Rudd’s stimulus package – Australian taxpayers got an average of about $1000 each to help kick-start the Australian economy – back-fired somewhat as they’re all over here, spending it in the New Zealand economy. And while the local businesses here are loving the cash injection, sadly there are suddenly queues at Treble Cone, where we used to be able to ski all day without ever having to wait to get on a chairlift. Saturday was an awesome blue sky powder day (photo below for your edification) but the wait to get on the chairlift was 20 minutes.

[Warning: What could be construed as a wee tiny rant follows.]

Worse, most of the Aussies I’ve encountered on this trip (to be fair, mostly young white men) confirm the stereotype: brash, loud, excruciatingly nasal accent; arrogant; somewhat racist. Extremely (uncomfortably) sexist. Also, completely dangerous yobs on snowboards. The kind that think it’s hilarious to race through the beginners area cutting so close to the already-shaky novices they make them startle and fall down.

On the plus side, there are also lots of French people here this year, so I’ve been able to get some practice at conversation. They seem delighted that anyone local would attempt to speak to them in their own language. Odd when you think about it, because most native English-speakers seem to take it for granted that the locals will converse with them in English when they visit France. Oh, and in general, the Frenchies’ opinion of the Aussies they’ve encountered has not been much better than mine. As one Frenchman put it to me, “They seem to lack…how you say…civilisation?”

I know this post lacked anything whatsoever to do with history, but I’m heading home tomorrow so it will be back to regular programming after that. Also, back to catching up on the many blog posts I’ve missed this last month that have now stacked up to terrifying proportions in my Google Reader.

I've been told this is the best view from a ski field anywhere in the world.

Friday Francophilia: Le Tour, toujours

On Bastille Day, I watched the peloton roll across the russet plains of the Limousin while thunderheads crouched on the horizon, and I asked myself why I love this event so much.

I actually can’t remember the first time I watched the Tour de France, but I do remember being instantly seduced by the beauty and rhythmic precision of the multi-coloured echelons sweeping along the D roads of rural France. I know it was before Lance Armstrong’s time, because the race is always different and more unpredictable when he hasn’t got the best, most expensive team in the world calling the shots. It was thanks to Lance, though, that the television coverage shifted from a precious 30 minutes of highlights a day to showing full stages.

It’s the drama that most attracts and holds me, I think. The breakaways that succeed for 150 kilometres, only to be chased down a few hundred metres from the finish line. Hollow-eyed riders literally clenching their teeth in pain as they struggle up monstrous mountains, their entire world shrunk to trying desperately not to lose the wheel of the bike in front. The cat-and-mouse battle that erupts a couple of kilometres from the end when a breakaway does succeed, and men who’ve worked together for hours to stay ahead of the bunch suddenly become sworn enemies. And, always, the men battling at the back, even behind the autobus, sharing food and support though they’re from different teams, trying to get each other to the finish line before the elimination time.

Then there are those bigger-than-life characters that seem to consider this as a metaphor for life itself and not merely a job. Tiny Marco Pantani with his enormous heart, soaring up Alpe d’Huez in his trademark bandana and silver earring. The crafty old sprinter Erik Zabel in Hell on Wheels, showing his human side by suggesting rum and coke would make a good recovery drink at the end of a particularly vicious mountain stage. And then there was Thomas Voeckler in 2004’s tour, clinging to the maillot jaune through the Pyrenees and into the Alps, against all hope and expectation. All day long, race radio would report ‘yellow jersey dropped, yellow jersey dropped’. The cameras would show Thomas, head hanging over the handlebars as he crawled along in his painfully awkward pedaling style, looking all but dead. But every time he went down, he would somehow find the guts to fight his way back to the group.

The Tour is, in all ways, quintessentially French. What could be more French than the calf-eyed Richard Virenque, undisputed king of the mountains, openly sobbing on national television as he begged forgiveness for his brush with the perennial Tour drug scandal? Drugs, of one kind or another, have been part of the Tour from its inception, though the early riders favoured cigarettes with a cognac or a bottle of wine instead of EPO or testosterone. And in what other sporting event would the guy who finished dead last – the lanterne rouge – be fêted as much as the winner?

Back in 2006, I was staying in an alpine village when the Tour was due to come through on its way to Alpe d’Huez. For days before, the people living in this charming though somewhat rundown backwater had been decorating their streets and houses with banners, signs and balloons, and on the day of the race the entire town was en fête. They treated us – complete strangers from the other end of the world – as friends and neighbours, related by a common love for this unique sporting event. The Luxembourg rider Frank Schleck won that day’s stage, and the man from Luxembourg who was staying at our hotel celebrated that evening by buying everyone in the hotel bar endless rounds of champagne (the good stuff, too!).

I think the thing I love most is the way the people of France have always taken the Tour to their heart. Year after year, even after all the disappointments of drug scandals and France’s losing streak (much better this year, though, with a clutch of stage wins), they decorate their towns and create massive sculptures out of hay and farm equipment in their fields. They line the roadsides and wait hours for a glimpse of riders who streak past at 50 or 60kph. They hike up mountains and camp out for days for the opportunity to run next to the riders for a few seconds as they drag themselves up to the summits.

And then, of course, there’s the scenery. La belle France, indeed.

Career angst and the scholarly life

Academic, Hopeful has a post up this week asking how graduate students should react to the inevitable question “what are you going to do next?” and/or variations on the theme of “why don’t you get a real job?”.

I’m having a hell of a month, just crazy-busy, and this post came close to triggering my own little existential crisis. I’ve come to graduate study as an older student, having already had two other careers. I suspect that because of my age, I've probably missed the boat on the standard academic career trajectory to tenured professor (and given the parlous state of academia these days, I’m not entirely sure it’s a career I would want anyway). The alternatives might be finding a niche in non-tenure-track academia, working as an independent scholar, or even being a genteel lady writer of historically-accurate medieval murder mysteries (I secretly quite fancy this last option).

Generally, people react positively when I tell them I’m doing graduate study until they find out I’m not doing something ‘useful’ like an MBA or a law degree. When I tell them I’m studying history, I’ll be received with bemused silence, a stuttered ‘why are you studying THAT?’, or – perhaps the most irritating response –patronising indulgence, as if I’m engaged in a somewhat eccentric hobby but at least it's keeping me out of trouble.

My personal experience is merely a microcosm. Those of us pursuing Humanities degrees are more likely to be accused of elitist dilettantism by politicians who have become increasingly focused on universities as factories for churning out tomorrow’s happy work-bots, rather than places where the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual freedom are considered as social goods in their own right. Because my main interest is medieval history, I get really prickly at the fact medieval studies often gets a star mention in newspaper articles scoffing at the ‘useless’ things universities are teaching these days. Yes, ‘useless’ things like critical thinking (perhaps politicians would secretly prefer it if the rest of us had less training in this area?), the ability to effectively analyse and synthesise complex information, or the skills to read and research both widely and deeply and then assess all the evidence on its own merits.

I’m fortunate to have earned a scholarship that covers my tuition fees (though who knows how long that will last?), and I also make enough from part-time PR contracting to pay the bills and keep a roof over my head. Without those factors, would I still be pursuing graduate study? I don’t know, and I’m certainly conscious of the financial privilege that makes my current situation viable. But at the same time, I simply can’t imagine being content with an existence where I’m not engaging in a life of the mind that rises above the mundane issues of our day-to-day world.

It’s difficult, daunting, and sometimes-tedious work (formatting references, anyone?), but when I’m doing it, there’s a thrumming inside me, a steady stretching of both cognition and intuition that seems to reverberate through my very centre. To anyone who hasn’t had the experience, it’s difficult to describe the sensation of discovering a single paragraph in 400 pages of text that opens a door in your mind, maybe even utterly changing the way you’ve been looking at the world. Or the secret thrill of finding a group of 600-year-old legal cases that appear – finally! – to confirm a theory you’ve been quietly harbouring for ages. Or the sheer enjoyment of the robust intellectual exercise that is taken tussling over the cracks in someone else’s long-cherished theory.

Rembrandt’s scholar may be a crusty old guy wearing a ruff, but I experience deep sense of empathy when I look at him. Across the gap of centuries, I can sense the cramping in his hand as he takes yet another page of notes, and I can feel the tired itchiness of eyes and a brain that have been tightly focused for hours. In him, I see my own drive to keep reading, keep looking, keep questioning. A drive that can sometimes be stronger than those most basic human needs of sleep and food. A drive provoked by an even deeper fear (certain knowledge that is yet unacknowledged), that my days will run out before my questions do.

That is ‘why’ and that is ‘what comes next’ because for me, it is coterminous with life itself.

* Image: Rembrandt, A Scholar, 1631. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

History played for laughs

My chickens are coming home to roost this week as I’m coming to realise how much I have to get done by early September. For school, that includes two research essays and a seminar presentation, and for work a major website project for which I am writing all the content and coordinating the design and development teams (herding cats). Oh, and I need to fit a couple of weeks of skiing in there, too. And it’s nearly the END of JUNE! So it was either turn to drink or find a little light relief.

An article this week on the Blackadder series – “the most successful historical television sitcom yet conceived” – reminded me how much this show made me laugh when it first came out. Here’s a scene from one of my favourite episodes in which, after the murder of Thomas Becket, the king has made his venal and slithering son Prince Edmund Blackadder the Archbishop of Canterbury. Blackadder and his henchmen immediately set about figuring out how they can make some cash out of the gig, and I think their take on the booming late medieval trade in indulgences and false relics would have brought a smile to Geoffrey Chaucer’s lips.

Lessons for girls, or why I hate Disney

There has been a great discussion over at Historiann's place this week on anger, and society’s implicit messages that anger is not an appropriate emotional outlet for women. As Historiann pointed out:

Girls are subjected to an impressive load of anti-anger propaganda. Snow White and Cinderella, at least in the mid-century modern Disneyfied versions we’re stuck with today in U.S. popular culture, are both specifically praised for remaining sweet and good-natured in spite of the fact that they’re turned into indentured servants by their stepmothers.

The lesson for girls? Forget Disney’s parade of simpering cheerful victims. It’s okay – hell, it’s healthy! – to get angry (though generally, it’s not okay to punch people or kick them in shins, tempting as that might be at times). Now I personally don’t have too much of a problem expressing my anger, but it does my head in that the response I often get is not acknowledgement that this may be a valid reaction to the situation at hand, or even rational argument to counter the reasons for my anger, but patronising advice to ‘just calm down’ and ‘don’t get hysterical’. This generally results in me becoming more spitting mad, because it is an obvious silencing tactic – whether deliberately deployed or not – that ignores or invalidates whatever I have to say and denies me my voice.

Disney also taught us that nice girls always do what they’re asked to and never say no. Did Cinderella ever say ‘take your chimney cleaning rag and stick it where the sun don’t shine’? No, I didn’t think so. For me, learning to say no has been a tougher lesson than being okay with anger, and it’s one I still haven’t fully mastered.

I succumbed again yesterday when I agreed to do an urgent task for someone at work, derailing my own research plans to start ploughing through the 21 books I have lined up to read in the next couple of weeks. I could legitimately have said no – I’m engaged to work three days a week at this company and today wasn’t one of my days, plus I didn’t have the information I needed readily to hand. But the words ‘sure, no problem’ were out of my mouth instinctively before my brain had even fully engaged with the request. I don’t begrudge the person who asked, as he is often the first person to offer help to others, but in hindsight it does strike me as disturbing that it didn’t even occur to me that saying no was an option until it was too late. I was never a fan of Disney’s ‘princess stories’ even as a kid, so it seriously pisses me off that some of those twisted Disney values have managed to weasel their way into my subconscious anyway.

Sex, drugs and...Samuel Taylor Coleridge??

I was lucky enough recently to get to go to a concert by Iron Maiden, who rarely tour in my neck of the woods. (Yes, I admit it, I’m a child of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s and I still LOVES me some head-bangin’. The very first album I bought with my own money was AC/DC’s Back in Black.) Iron Maiden’s lead singer Bruce Dickinson is quite the showman. In fact, even if you’re not that into heavy rock music, their live act is worth seeing just for the sheer theatrical scale of it. They recently beat out several much younger and ‘cooler’ bands to win the 2009 Brit Award for Best Live Act.

Now, Iron Maiden (or ‘Maiden’ as the hardcore fans call them) are surprisingly literate as far as 80s head bangers go. Quite a few of their songs are based on classic books or poems, and such a one is their take on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. At the start of this particular song, a set slowly appears from the darkness of the stage, featuring as a backdrop the tattered sails and rigging of a ghostly wooden sailing ship. Dickinson appears, dressed in a ragged overcoat and swinging a staff, and starts stalking the faux decks. In ominous tones, he introduces the song, saying he is about to tell a famous, dreadful tale by -- Samuel – Taylor – Coleridge! Ha! I never would have believed it, but this swarming mass of long-haired weed-smoking black-jeans-clad head-bangers lets out a huge roar of approval. Coleridge gets the ultimate metal fan’s accolade - the Devil’s horns - and I hear a few drunken shouts of “yeah, Coleridge!”.

It was truly a moment of culture clash on a grand and bizarre scale. Although Coleridge himself may not have felt entirely out of place in this anti-Establishment, drug-smoking crowd.

Raison d’être

Why am I here?

Don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on some existentialist rant about the nature of reality or the meaning of life (not in this post, anyway). This is about why I’ve decided to blog, and why now.

I’ve been a professional writer in some sense for most of my adult life. I’ve worked as a journalist, an editor and a corporate communications flunky. And now, as a grad student in history, research and writing is a major focus in my life. I’ve been keeping a research journal for a couple of years now, noting down ideas and questions and recording the odd particularly well-turned phrase or paragraph for future use (“here’s one I prepared earlier!”). So one purpose for this blog is to give me an outlet to articulate some of those ideas, and hopefully, discuss and debate them with other like-minded people.

I also love fiction writing and harbour that secret ambition to produce a novel (yes, I have a number of chapters already saved on my computer and several notebooks full of wine-fuelled 3am scribblings). I hope the self-imposed discipline of blogging will get me into a pattern of writing more regularly and that this can also become a place from which I can reach out to other writers (since we tend to be a rather introverted bunch at times). I find it incredibly useful to read about how others approach the research and writing process, including (maybe especially!) how they get over, around and through the inevitable struggles and disappointments.

And, to be honest, I don’t want to become one of those people. You know, those mad old creatures that write endless raving letters to the editor and sit on the bus muttering to themselves. Like most people, I see incidents of incompetence, rudeness, intolerance, injustice and plain old weirdness every day. My immediate reaction is to start composing those outraged letters in my head, and I tend to stew over them with steadily increasing (but probably unhealthy) levels of passion or vitriol until I get the opportunity to take them out on some poor unsuspecting friend or colleague. So this will be a place where I can unleash the odd random rant as well.