Victorianitas

I'm now up to 2,307 words of the article, including a couple of paragraphs copied over from the original draft I was working on back in March. I thought that these were all good words. But, no.

2,307 words, of which three are - and I quote - 'somethingy somethingy something'.

Why do I do this to myself?

My PhD was passed with minor revisions, meaning I got a couple of months to fix some typos, shuffle around some footnotes, and add an extra paragraph or so into one of my chapters. If that doesn't sound like a couple of months' work, well, I won't argue; it's the sort of thing that could be done in an afternoon, easily. If I wanted to. If, when I opened the letter from Registry that listed the things I had to do, I hadn't put it back in its envelope, tucked it into a bookcase, and put the whole thing off until another day.

So seven weeks out of my eight weeks went past, and I didn't do the revisions, and my supervisor sent me pointed e-mails, and I didn't do the revisions, and my friends pointed out that I wasn't ever going to get to call myself Doctor unless I did the revisions, and I didn't do the revisions. I know, I know, I know. But that deadline was creeping ever closer, so today I sat down in the office and opened up the folder named 'FINAL final thesis', and found out why I'd put those revisions off for so long. It turns out, see, that putting the finishing touches on your thesis the second time around brings back all the memories of doing it the first time. And finishing the thesis the first time was Not Fun.

This was late September, when I spent most of my time in the office, working on my thesis, or at home, working on my thesis, or at work, sneakily proofreading chapters of my thesis whenever things were quiet. The rest of the time, I was planning classes and writing lectures for the courses I was teaching on, both of which were completely new to me. On Wednesday nights, I lectured from 6.30 to 7.30, then held a tutorial from 7.30 to 8.30, then went back across campus to my office and wrote until the ten-to-midnight bus home, then put in another hour or so of work at the kitchen table, then went to bed in time to get up for the 8.30am shift at work on Thursdays, after which I'd write all afternoon, go back to work for the evening shift, then head back over to the office at 9pm to write some more. Then home, then more writing, then back in at 8.30am on Friday for the morning shift... and so on. Sometimes I slept. I think. It's all a bit hazy now.

For the months leading up to September, there was ongoing noisy building work in the corridors on either side of my office. Drills, hammers, yelling, more drills, every day from nine to five. The evenings would have been quieter, but the only way to stop myself falling asleep at my desk was loud music, and so loud music it was. I was tired right through to my soul, and hating every word of my thesis. My to-do list was a five-page stapled document. I was terrified of not getting the thesis finished in time, and equally terrified of getting an extension and spending another three months living that way.

And then the computer ate one of my chapters, and I spent a day drenched in cold sweat and terror as the file retrieval software chugged its way slowly, slowly, slowly through the hard drive.

And then our printer broke, in a sneaky, underhanded way that disguised itself as just needing to be cleaned. We'd call the technicians; the technicians would clean it and print out a test sheet in dazzling whiteness; we'd express scepticism over the lasting power of the fix; the technicians would give us that 'yeah, right' look that only IT professionals have truly mastered, and leave; the printer would print fifty sheets fine, and then cover everything in smudgy lines of ink again. This went on for, I kid you not, months. Mid-September, ten days before two of us were due to print off our PhD theses on the printer that the technicians kept saying was fine, the head of department got involved and the whole thing turned into an adolescent carousel of snappy e-mails and hurt feelings: nobody had told the senior technicians! nobody had told the secretaries! and now we were whining and stamping our feet and going over their heads like they weren't trying to help when they hadn't even had a chance to get it fixed for us! Which, all right, fine, nobody knew, the fault-reporting system was messed up, but dear God we had more important things to care about and why won't somebody fix the damn printer?

Three days before the PhD was due in, I was sitting on my desk trying to reassure the head IT guru that nobody had meant any offence by the whole thing, really, honestly, and it wasn't that we were angry with him, per se, or any of the others, and we knew everyone was doing the best they could, really we did, but things were kind of urgent here so - no, no, I wasn't implying he didn't care about that, it's just that we are handing these in on Friday so - no, we weren't mad at anybody personally... etc. It was one of the most surreal moments of my academic career so far, perfected when my e-mail notification went 'bing!' and the IT guru saw an e-mail from the other nearly-done printerless PhD student titled something like 'Re: WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE INCOMPETENT FUCKWITS AND HOW IS IT OUR FAULT?' Heh.

I was crushingly, achingly tired, and writing, writing, writing (and then teaching, and writing lectures, and going to work, and coming back to the office, and writing, writing, writing some more). I wanted to curl up in a little heap under my desk and cry myself to sleep, and if I hadn't been so scared of not being finished in time I think I would have done. I remember sitting in the office late one night, my head buried in my hands, muttering 'I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this,' over and over again. When I found out I had an extra two days to finish the thesis, I considered taking them for maybe thirty seconds before deciding that if I had to spend two more days on the damn thing, I would either collapse or go crazy or both. I knew that. I still know it now.

And yet, the day of the deadline I'd passed into some weird euphoric state, smiling and joking and noticing how beautiful the world was. I didn't care that I'd had two hours of sleep, or that the new printer was spitting out my pages all over the floor, or that I'd forgotten to bring in my student card and would have to face down the ogres at Registry without it. The world was a good place again. I was almost skipping along the path down to the Registry office; I couldn't keep myself from smiling for hours afterwards. I had my self back. And what got me from misery to euphoria was the knowledge that it was done, and that I was never, never, never again going to have to spend one more night working on that damn thesis.

All of which is why I left my corrections to the absolute last minute (and why I was back in the office three hours ago, yelling "Oh, you will NOT do this to me again!" at a printer). But now, finally, finally, it's all done.

Can I call myself Dr yet? Please?

Somewhere in the ether of possibilities exists The Best Way to take notes, and I haven't found it yet. Part of me sometimes craves the organised simplicity of revision notes for my science exams - handwritten, meticulously bullet-pointed, three different colours of ink (blue as a default, green for technical terms, red for equations and diagrams) - and then I remember that I only ever kept that up for a page or two before abandoning it in favour of the many, many things more appealing to my teenage self than science revision, anyway. If that's The Best Way, then it's doomed to be a brief one.

I've given up on taking notes for anything that doesn't strictly need it. Papers, conferences, and the undergraduate lectures TAs still have to attend, are all note-free now. Why bother, if I can't write down anything I'll ever need or want to read again? Like playing chess, note-taking during presentations is a skill I just don't have. But there's no way around it when you're working on written material, and so I flit from highlighter to bullet-point to margin scribble, while the perfect mechanism for taking notes sits (I am convinced) somewhere in a disregarded office of my mind, drinking tea from a Kobayashi cup, smirking.

You can write in the margins. If you've got over your instinctive skin-crawling aversion to writing on books, that is, you can write in the margins. But then, what do you write? My notes here are brief, crippled by self-awareness (isn't that stating the obvious? Aren't I trying to sound too smart here? What does that even mean?). Two or three pages, and I'm back to the comfort of underlines and highlighters (on photocopies! only on photocopies!), or torn-up bits of Post-It, or these useful items, which just mutely, non-judgementally point at things I might want to see again. The idea is always that I'll go back through the text and summarise everything highlighted into a simple document, one that will make sense on its own merits, one neatly built with the bricks of quotations and the mortar of my own commentary; the idea usually remains an idea. I read somewhere (and, ha, didn't note down the reference) that one of the least useful ways to take notes is to assemble a list of quotations scattered with the occasional paraphrase. Lazy! Simplistic! Unworthy of a real scholar! But if there's an alternative that works, it eludes me yet.

The Best Way, I'm dimly sure, also requires going through one book at a time and summarising it as a whole once your productive self reaches the end. But I don't read this way; I don't do anything this way. Currently, there are six different books in grabbing distance of the computer, all with bookmarks in different places. (The novels and non-fiction piled up by my bed are in the same state.) How is it even possible to read one book at once, especially when you're reading it intensively with your critical head on, without getting bored and resenting it three chapters in? Don't you start wondering what's in all those other books? Counting down pages to the end of a chapter, bargaining with yourself that you'll make some coffee once you get to the next subheading, forcing yourself to read the same sentence eight times over because it's going in one eye and out of the other? I'm probably not making useful notes anyway, but that mindset wouldn't help.

So here's what I've got at the moment: a Word document divided into six sections (so far), one each for the five books that I've noted anything from and one for scrappy, half-formed, stream of consciousness drafts of the argument I'm working on myself. The notes themselves are mostly quotations, or paraphrases, interspersed with cryptic little messages like 'Augustine->Bordieu(?)(!)' (and this doesn't even mean anything to me now, and I only wrote that last night). Nothing's finished yet; I am, effectively, fighting a war on six fronts, and the troops don't know where they're going.

I've spent twenty-three years of my life (dear God) in full-time education. Surely I've got this sorted out by now. And yet, I can't help thinking that there exists a Best Way, and that all my efforts have merely overlooked it as it strolls past me unrecognised, out into the world.

Page 135 of the thesis read-through, and things are looking up. And down. Sort of. I still feel like a complete and utter fool for not catching all the typos, but the thing as a whole is turning out to be a lot more interesting and readable than I remembered it being. (Admittedly, 'readable' always sounds like a backhanded compliment for academic prose.) Maybe all I needed was several months of not reading the damn thing, after all.

And perhaps a bit more time spent in my favourite city bookshop with a coffee, a stack of things I haven't read yet, and unlimited WiFi. That helped.

You know how some people can't stand hearing their own voice on an answerphone? How they (we) cower away, hands over ears, squeaking "Do I really sound like that? I don't sound like that, do I?", and refuse to be in the same room if the thing needs to be replayed? I am also like that with my work. When I'm writing, I can revise and rewrite ad infinitum (and if I had a different supervisor, that might not be an exaggeration; I see your stories of supervisors sending Strongly Worded E-mails and raise you my supervisor appearing out of nowhere to shout 'Go back to your desk and write your damn thesis!' at me down corridors), but once it's done, it's done. Gone. Over. I never want to see it again. Re-reading my own work is like operating on my own scalp, without anaesthetic or a mirror.

As you can guess, then, re-reading my entire PhD thesis as viva preparation is not my idea of fun.

The agony is of several types. First, there is the stabbing pain experienced when spotting a typo, or a messed-up reference, or a 'p.???' next to a quotation, or on at least one occasion an actual missing word and how the hell did I not notice that?, knowing that my examiners will see exactly the same thing and that there is nothing I can do to fix it, short of sneaking into their offices with Tipp-Ex, which let's just pretend is ethically beneath me. I knew this was coming, and numbed myself to it with Twiglets and several episodes of The Armando Iannucci Show to reward myself with when the pain gets too bad.

Second is the growing realisation, radiating across my soul like the tendrils of a migraine, that I cannot actually write. This isn't true, really - my academic prose style might not be anything to lead troops into battle with, but it is, she says humbly, usually somewhere around 'decent' - but re-reading brings all the flaws to the front. All the flaws. Every single awkward sentence construction from pages 1 to 36 is now scratched in letters of fire on the thin, trembling membrane of my self-esteem, and I only stopped there because I couldn't bear to read any further.

Third is a nagging ache, threatening to explode into something terrible. Re-reading, you see, means reading my entire thesis from front cover to back, in that order. And I, um... I haven't actually done this before. Obviously, I've read and re-read all of it, at different points, and obviously I've done some thinking about how various chapters fitted together, and obviously I've re-read the second half of chapter 3 with the new conclusions from chapter 2 in mind, and so on, but I've never actually read through the whole thing as an entity in its own right. Yes, maybe this would have been a good idea, but, listen, the only time when I had the whole thing together to read was at 4.30am on the night before the submission deadline, and I was very, very tired and had not yet entered the weirdly euphoric state I ended up in for most of the next day, and also I was busy with more immediate matters like making my footnotes not be in 2-point font (about which, screw you, Word) and trying to nestle enough office chairs together to sleep on and getting images in the right order for my appendix and working out a battle strategy for a fight over the printer the next day, which never actually happened, as it turned out, but had the potential to be fairly draining if it had, and anyway, by that time it would have been too late to do anything substantial even if I had read the whole thesis cover-to-cover, right? Right.

Or wrong. Whatever. It's too late, now, and if I find any massive structural problems at this point, even Tipp-Ex and a skeleton key won't help me get them past the examiners.

I do not love thee, Chapter One
You plod and drag, you're not much fun
But here I'm stuck until you're done -
I do not love thee, Chapter One.

I do not love thee, Chapter Two
I doubt if half your claims are true
Or that I ever proofread you
I do not love thee, Chapter Two.

I do not love thee, Chapter Three
Despite old claims to the contrary
For I knew bugger all in 2003
And I do not love thee, Chapter Three.

I do not love thee, Chapter Four
And can't think what I ever saw
In writing like a book report
I do not love thee, Chapter Four.

I do not love thee, Chapter Five
I'm wishing I had changed my mind
About the whole damn enterprise
And especially you, dear Chapter Five.

(Normal blogging will resume shortly. I just need to rewrite the entire thesis from scratch, and then I'll be right with you.)

Dickens, to his co-editor W. H. Wills, on one issue of his magazine All The Year Round:

In the first place the No. is an awfully and solemnly heavy one, and if you have any kind of means to that end by you, must really be lightened. I read it last night, and had a nightmare. I doubt if anything so heavy (except stewed lead) could possibly be taken before going to bed.

At half-past two this morning I was sitting on the floor with a ring-binder open on my lap, because as we all know, people sign up for PhDs because they can't be bothered with the heavy demands of the real world, in which you are allowed to sleep sometimes. (Or so I hear.) And it's strange what tricks your mind can play on you in the early hours of the morning. The world seems so empty, for one thing. You know you shouldn't be awake, and somehow you end up thinking that's some kind of rule, as if 2.30am exists for the universe to run maintenance checks and you're really not supposed to be watching. Tired eyes get bored with scanning through notes and start inventing flickers of movement just outside your field of vision. My house creaks and thumps in the night, or maybe my neighbours creak and thump in the night, and believe me, it's possible to come up with all kinds of ideas about what's making those sounds.

(I used to work night shifts. Same thing.)

So anyway, the whispery little voice inside my head which pipes up at times like this, the one that still thinks I'm living by a water-hole in Pleistocene Africa and dodging sabre-toothed cats on a regular basis, was working overtime. Thump. What's that? Was that outside? Did it come from the kitchen? Is there somebody in the kitchen? What would I do if there was somebody in the kitchen?... Oh, don't be stupid. And back to work, until ten minutes later, when: Rustle. What was THAT? All right, that definitely came from the kitchen. There's someone in there. Unless it was a mouse. Which it probably was. Unless, unless, it's a crazed serial killer looking for the knives, and I'm spending the last few minutes of my life flipping through a ring-binder... Wait, what am I thinking? Sheesh. And so on.

Until something fell down, I'm guessing outside, with the kind of crash that could not in any circumstances be reasonably blamed on a mouse. And instinct took over. Every cell in my body was listening to that whispery little voice, and for a moment there, I really, truly believed that something or someone was about to leap into the room and go for my jugular.

And my first response, on pure, reactive instinct, was to reach for the keyboard and hit Save.

I might get murdered by a knife-wielding maniac or eaten alive by a time-travelling saber-toothed cat, but so help me God I am not losing a single footnote of this chapter.

I'm falling in love with an author. Not in the standard (well, standard for me) crush-on-a-long-dead-poet way, but through the kind of accidental romance that starts with a footnote and ends in chasing publishers down the street, out of breath and scattering pages behind you ("waaaaaaaaait, Mr Penguin!"), as you try to explain how Very, Very Important it is that they contract you to edit a new scholarly edition of her best-known work.

She's one of those Victorian writers who flourished for a little while and then faded back into obscurity again, and she's part of a big enough crowd in that. Still, she's worth a revival. Her writing probably won't be the Next Big Thing in Victorian studies, but it's interesting and unusual and funnier than it has a right to be, and more people should read her. Some people should read her. Anybody should read her. And if they're not reading her, they should start selling her books at prices I can afford.

She's gone from a few footnotes in my thesis to taking up most of one chapter, and she's worked her way into every conference paper I've given in the last year. I had to fight my better judgement on including an irrelevant, biographical footnote on her in an article I'm writing at the moment. My long-term research plan features her heavily, I'm already mentally drafting the next article (in which she'll feature prominently), and I'm about three weeks away from printing 'Obscure Victorian Writers ROCK!' T-shirts and setting up a campaign to raise awareness. (Would Bono help, do you think?)

Everyone needs a champion, even if the best you can get is a completely non-influential one living a hundred and fifty years too late.