a day in the life

Every week or so I go over to Glasgow University. Glasgow University is sort of like the BU or NYU of Glasgow, whereas Strathclyde, which is my school, is more like MIT. Glasgow Uni is this amazing, magical, campusy place (complete with trees!). They've got an English language/linguistics department and a literature department, and their library is amazing, whereas Strathclyde is in the middle of the city centre and much less humanities-oriented. (Basically I have a giant crush on Glasgow University.)




Today I listened to a lecture about relative pronouns in the morning and spent my afternoon reading original texts from the 1600s. While this is not the book I actually read (predictably, the special archives collection won't let me take take pictures); I was actually reading about Early Modern English Women's social roles. Last week I was granted access by Oxford to download their full-text Old English and Middle English databases; which means now I have the entire written (documented) early English corpus on my computer. Also today I met with one of the big people in corpus linguistics and a few weeks ago I met with someone who headed the Oxford English Dictionary's recently-published Historical Thesaurus project, both at Glasgow University.

YOU GUYS HOW IS THIS MY LIFE I DON'T EVEN KNOW

quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock

In case you were curious, the Tour De La Bibliothèques is still ongoing. Here is an illustrated guide to my life as a professional reader.

This is what I am researching, explained with dinosaurs and probably much more helpful than my previous post about it:
(from dinosaur comics by ryan north)


I go to Widener every week or so to get copies of articles to read. I look at an on-line catalog, request items, wait for them to arrive, make photocopies of them, return the items, and repeat. Here I am making sure I have all the pages of one article.
If I want to borrow a book, I have to get Dr. Green to sign it out for me. Then I bring all of this home with me.

During the rest of the week, I come to Wheaton College's library, where I sit in the basement with the history books to read and take notes on my computer. Today I am reading about lying.
Because I am super-nearsighted, I have to wear my glasses when I read. Even though I wear contacts in my daily life, my lenses hypercorrect for distance and then I can't read. As you can imagine, this is counterproductive.

That's it! This is what I do every day instead of having an actual job. There's not much to say about being a research assistant. I don't have to get dressed up or anything; I just sort of sit somewhere, listen to music, and read. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I figured it was time to talk about something other than mail fails.

Use your education and take an educated guess

You are probably all on the edges of your seats waiting to hear about Harvard. Am I right? HA! I knew it.

I didn't have any problems getting access to Widener. In order to be granted Library Privileges, I had to bring a letter from my public library stating that my needs as a scholar do not exist outside this one building. I was granted Reading Room privileges as expected, which means I am allowed in exactly one and a half rooms in this giant, beautiful library: the reading room and the bathroom (a bathroom doesn't count as a real room in my book; it's a little past the circulation desk, so I guess we'll call that space "half a room"). Apparently I am also allowed in a computer lab if I am not bringing a computer with me; because I am bringing my laptop that has been nullified.

Anyway, this is what my Harvard University ID looks like. (Please appreciate my terrible haircut.) I am allowed into Widener Research Library for 6 days per 12 month period. So even though this card expires a year from now, I have five more days in this library. A day is 24 hours from original swipe-in, so I am allowed to leave for lunch and whatnot. This does not quite factor in the fact that this library is not open 24 hours a day, but no matter. This is Harvard, they can do what they like.

In the humanities (or "Not-Science"), the word "research" usually is translated into "reading a lot of things." The professor I'm working for - an ancient man with an adorably out-of-date laptop - presented me with a 46 page bibliography and told me to look through it and select what I wanted to read. From there, I would find these texts in the library catalog. I am not allowed in the stacks (if you want a study carrel you have to apply for that too. This place does not fuck around!), so I have to request individual journals to make photocopies of the articles. I can request up to 10 things per hour; I don't know if anyone actually achieves this over the course of a day. Dr Green has borrowing privileges, so if I want to take any books out to bring home, he has to do it for me. He is very nice about this, if not very deaf; the rest of the Reading Room was not very pleased whenever we talked.

I spent the morning getting used to their library catalog and generally making a mess of my to-find list. You guys, this is what research was like before the internet! I filled out a bunch of request forms and looked up more things. I've used a lot of the journals listed in this bibliography... and I remembered that I didn't have to go to the Dimond Library to do so. It turns out that a few of these journals are available online through JSTOR! (Un?)surprisingly, you need a Harvard logon to use their JSTOR access, but through UNH's blackboard portal I can still use these resources. DEAR EVERYONE AT UNH: BLACKBOARD DID SOMETHING RIGHT FOR A CHANGE. WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THAT. IT'S CONFUSING RIGHT?

I was still waiting for my earlier requests to come through, so I took a lunch break. I don't know Cambridge well, so I ended up going across the street to Qdoba and bringing my lunch back to Harvard Yard. In the maybe 30 minutes I was out there, no less than six people assumed I was a Harvard student and asked me for directions. I am pleased that I look appropriately collegiate.

When I came back, my requests had come through, so I now had the daunting task of remembering why I wanted them and making photocopies. I would just like to throw it out there how happy I am that UNH put all of our information on just one card; I have a separate card from Dr Green just for printing/photocopying. It took me three different documents to figure out that the copier auto-double-sides everything. This copier had a very effective guide of how it worked (COPIES COME OUT HERE, COLLATED PAGES GO IN HERE, MORE PAPER IS AVAILABLE AT THE DESK ASK FOR HELP etc) - clearly they realize that while the world's premiere academics can think about complex things they (we?) cannot handle Xerox machines.

Anyway, Dr Green had to run off to a meeting for the afternoon, so I ended up leaving Widener around 3 pm with three books, six articles, and a fairly infinite number of articles available on-line. Basically I do not have to be in Boston every day (which is a life saver, waking up at 5 am just to get into Boston around 8 was going to kill me!) However, I am now officially calling August the Tour De La Bibliothèques while I read and take notes. On Wednesday I read thirty pages about the sentence "I love you" on my way home; Thursday I camped out in my town's sometimes-commmunityesque college and brushed up on doing pragmatics.

Doing pragmatics is serious business.

Dear Linguistics, YOUR LOVE IS MY DRUG

1. So I went on that job interview. And I didn't fuck it up ... until they very end!
I talked to the ladies who currently are Administrative Assistants-slash-Grammatical Editors; they gave me a cup of coffee, an article to edit, and a red pen. It's like my dream job interview! And apparently nobody's ever done that well on their practice document before, so they were a little bit floored. Basically, they were like "We really like you, we'll let you know by Friday. Is there anything else you want us to know?"

And I was all, "Well, I'm sorry that you didn't get back to me earlier in the summer when I had full availability; I can only do this part-time right now - I've been working (will be starting to work, ahem, whatever) with a professor at BU and then I'm moving to Scotland for grad school."

Lady: (jaw drop)"Well, thanks for taking the time to come in."

And then I walked out. I haven't felt that badass in a while.


2. SPEAKING OF BADASS (this is relative, perhaps if you are not me, you will not feel the same way)
I heard back from another professor I e-mailed recently. He's been busy wrapping up this project which is essentially a corpus of Old English Poetics and language "to detect relationships between, and structures within, poetic texts in [the] Old English [corpus]". He had been away for a week, which means he just got my e-mail and apologized if he missed out on having me on board due to this fact.
But he also warned me that
a) they had run out of funding
b) they were nearly finished with it
c) I AM ACTUALLY OVERQUALIFIED TO DO THIS.


3. Oh, and Sarah Palin called herself Shakespeare and I wrote about it.

YOU GUYS, THIS IS AWESOME.

Our aspirations are wrapped up in books

I read a lot, and consider myself to be very well-read. I don't know if it's especially apparent when you meet me - I don't think I have the self-awareness necessary to make that claim - but it's true. I majored in English not because I wanted to write, but because I wanted someone to tell me what to read! But for all the highfalutin Smart-People Books Read In College (And Beyond) - literature! - that I read, I am a sucker for most mass-consumed things. I get so tired of hearing all the hype for a book that I end up having to go read it, just to see for myself.

This is how I end up reading things like the first book in the Twilight series, multiple Dan Brown books and Eat Pray Love (yes, really). To my own credit, a majority of the time spent with these books involved throwing them against a wall, because Dan Brown seems utterly incapable of writing anything vaguely resembling a sentence. Stephanie Meyer and Elizabeth Gilbert can't do anything remotely literary. To put it simply, these books sucked and I want those hours of my life back. I am still legitimately angry that I spent time reading them several years ago.

Whenever I walked within 30 feet of a bookstore or tried to buy a book online, I found myself constantly barraged by how wonderful and great Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy supposedly was. And thus the internal monologue begins: "Shut up already, it can't be that good." This eventually becomes "....well, they keep getting more popular. What if they are really good? Maybe I should look into this" which becomes "OKAY FINE I'LL READ IT. But I'm buying a real book too."

Crime thrillers are definitely not my thing, as I'm sure you can imagine; I've found them to be just so formulaic and predictable. If need be, they can make a nice "light read". Or, you know, a really annoying one.

And so with all of that in mind, I started The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, expecting mediocrity. Instead I found out that I could not put it down. This book was so well-written, with an unexpected level of depth. There's a lot more than Uncomfortable Romance Between Characters and Intoxicating Plot Twists Involving Corrupt People! I mean, these factors are certainly there, but you won't care. You will read 300-400 pages in what feels like no time. You will be hooked. It's almost addictive. You finish the first one and immediately start the second one. And by the time you finish the second one you just have to read the third one. There's no stopping you. YOU MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, oh my GOD!!

And although the translation is sometimes questionable - Swedish doesn't go into English easily, and a lot of the smaller details can be lost on a non-Swedish reader - the point is very much still there. The feminism driving these books is surprisingly great and very unexpected, too. (Originally the first book was titled Men Who Hate Women, a much better title if you ask me, but I think the translator changed the title so the three books would be consistent).

Please don't misunderstand - they certainly have their flaws. Critically speaking, nothing is perfect. There are definitely philosophical contradictions between two of the main characters which occasionally severely distract from the plot, and there are occasional narrative gaps which muddle things up a bit. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is by far the best out of the three: it exists both within the context of the trilogy and by itself; The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest makes some of the bloated first three hundred pages of The Girl Who Played With Fire totally worth it. It's a necessary concession for later; once the actual plot of Fire gets going, you are hooked all over again.

lately i have been thinking about academia

"Decide that you like college. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life."

-- Lorrie Moore

After this ridiculously crazy no-sleep, no-social-life, all-work thesis process I can't help but wonder why I have signed up for five to seven more years of masochism. And then I think about how rewarding of a process it is, but how truly frustrating it can be. It takes so much self control to not punch people in the face sometimes.

I think everyone should have to write a thesis / do some sort of equivalent senior capstone project in whatever discipline they choose to study -- way too many people float through college. Show me that you actually learned something while you were here rather than drank yourself to death every weekend. And take some goddamn pride in your work!


I am almost done with my thesis. I have a few minor things to tweak, but I'm very close.

Dear Dimond Library,

I missed you. I'm glad we're back together for the next few weeks.

Love,
Heather

lunch has been cancelled due to lack of hustle

So remember that time that I was getting freaked out by my thesis? Here's a story for you.

I had a meeting with my advisor today. The meeting pretty much went like this:

Shelly: There's no thesis, no coherency, and you haven't proven anything yet. You're not going to, if you continue on as you have been. These are merely notes on your corpora research. Consider them a reference from now on. You need to find this book, read it, and come back in a week with at least three pages written... and it needs to have an actual thesis.
Heather: Okay.
Shelly: When are you presenting? April sometime right?
Heather: April 23rd.
Shelly: That gives us a month. Good luck.

Essentially all the work I have done in the past six weeks is nullified. Which leaves me with absolutely nothing written and A MONTH TO DO IT ALL. So basically I am never eating or sleeping again.

(Conveniently, today I also got a job calling people around dinnertime to have them take surveys. I had submitted an application to the survey center a while ago. This would have been helpful about almost three months ago, when I wasn't doing anything of especial importance. I mean, I was, kind of, but I had the time to be flexible and work on a regular schedule... which is why I put in an application at the beginning of the semester; I certainly wasn't expecting to suddenly have to REWRITE 23 pages/6 weeks of work. Also today I had scheduled a census field worker test, hoping to have a summer job between undergrad and grad school. Go figure - of course today would be the one day I needed to read and essentially know an entire book.)

I think the correct phrase here is "take your balls out of your purse", which is exactly what I did: I ran off to the library, hoping they would have this book (thankfully they did) and IMMEDIATELY start reading it. I only recently finished reading and annotating tonight; tomorrow I'm assembling my thoughts and re-reading parts of it in hopes of being able to start writing on Saturday.

my thoughts today while reading
But this is okay. The way I'm looking at it, everyone has their Thesis Disaster story -- this is mine. It's totally fine. It just means that Beverly, my old and crotchety computer, will not blow up as she has been threatening to do; my hard drive won't erase itself; nobody in my family will die while I write my thesis. Right? Knock on wood, for sure.

it's like nataliedee.com made a portrait of me

remember: be here now

I don't think I do enough drugs to fully appropriate Ram Dass' 1971 book Remember: Be Here Now. (Nor do I think I will ever get there.) I'm also not especially interested in meditation or yoga. But lately I've been re-reading this book and remembering to calm down; even though I feel like I'm running out of time and things are going way too fast, it's going to be okay.

And while I'm on the topic of books

I present what will probably be the highlight of my summer.

From the publisher's website --
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters coauthor Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina: an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a strange new world of robots, cyborgs, and interplanetary travel.

As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These four, yearning for true love, live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls. Their passions alone would be enough to consume them—but when a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society’s high-tech lifestyle, our heroes must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen.

I, FOR ONE, AM EXCITED
(especially as I just read the original over break)

Re: Twilight

The Twilight phenomenon never fails to utterly baffle me. How was this book/franchise SO POPULAR?!

"The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."

J.D. Salinger died today.

And like nearly everyone else who ever read Catcher In The Rye, I am saddened by this fact. J.D. Salinger was one of my favorite authors; Franny and Zooey is one of my favorite books - I've bought at least five copies over the years just because they're necessary to have around and give to people. (In my mild defense, I hated Catcher in the Rye... everyone should read Franny & Zooey and Nine Stories instead. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters/Seymour: An Introduction is great too.)

I hope a) nobody tries to make a goddamn phony movie out of Catcher in the Rye and b) that Salinger has a few manuscripts sitting around that might get published posthumously.


Though I try to keep up with the news, I'm not always very good at it. The internet makes it too easy to ignore these things while they are happening, because an instant replay or a succinct summary is always available. I skipped the State of the Union yesterday - I can always catch the important parts on YouTube and Hulu right? - to drink a box of wine with some friends in the art studios.

This might have been the most pretentious thing I have ever written. I'm sorry, friends.

this is how i feel every time i am in a bookstore

(from Alison Bechdel's Entertainment Weekly piece for their 1000th issue)

íslenska

I spent my junior year of college translating Old English into Modern English. This was easily one of the most tedious things I have ever done. But, Intro to Old English and Beowulf were easily two of the best classes I have ever taken. Sometimes - though not frequently - I find myself missing it.

THAT SAID...I would be very okay if I never had to see any more epic poetry.

but, i find myself getting unnecessarily excited over the existence of the following collection of Early Icelandic poetry:

i think this speaks volumes about me.