baby don't go in no corners

I've been a PhD student for two and a half years and only gave my first departmental paper on Tuesday evening. I've given papers before and it's actually something I quite enjoy, but giving a paper to your entire faculty is something else altogether. It went very well, thankfully, and a moment of extreme smugness ensued when one of the professors asked me where I lived in France (a lot of my paper is in French). I've never lived in France, I'm just pretty good with languages.

While the experience was less painful than expected, it also reinforced what I wrote about a few days ago. I don't want to know everything about an extremely limited field, � la academia: I want to know everything about everything. I am inquisitive and curious - insatiably so. I clip interesting looking places/books/shows/etc out of newspapers or magazines and then I actually go there/read them/see them. Cf. latest wonderful discovery - the Alice-in-Wonderlandesque cocktail bar 69 Colebrooke Row - thanks to an article in the FT weekend magazine.

Apart from my game of cultural russian roulette - which for me seems to work better with books than music and has brought me GK Chesterton's Napoleon of Notting Hill, Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself, JK Donlevy's Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B as well as Ronan Bennett's The Catastrophist and Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing - I keep my eyes peeled and my ears open.

If I hear a song in a shop or a cafe and I have no idea who it is, I'll write down a few of the lyrics and track down the song later when I get home. This doesn't seem to yield the same kind of results that I get with random book buying, but I've come to The Cribs, The Young Knives, and the Hot 8 Brass Band this way.

One of the best books I've ever read - James Salter's Light Years - was discovered by snooping through the contents of the desk of a very cute boy sitting next to me in the London Library. I wondered what he was reading and when he vacated his desk for a moment, I took the opportunity to rifle through the books on his desk (like I said, insatiably curious). The book at the top of the pile was Light Years, which I'd never heard of, so I went out and bought a copy and then spent the next day on the terrace at Somerset House savouring it. Such a marvellous book! And one which I might never have come to know had I not been up to my silly tricks.

When I was in Edinburgh over the Christmas holidays I headed to Armchair Books [Armchair served as the inspiration for Dylan Moran's Black Books bookshop - tis an Edinburgh institution] to pick up a few gifts and look for something new for me. I found what I was looking for giftwise and then asked the [totally and hilariously random] bookseller if he might recommend something good. As it happened, he was just about to put a book on the 'staff recommendation' shelf with a handwritten note blue tacked to the front which read: 'This book is astoundingly good. And I have excellent taste.' I finally got around to reading the book on Tuesday, but your man was right. I don't know if it's astoundingly good, but it is a good book [it's Russell Hoban's Amaryllis Night and Day]. But the thing that really gets me is that it's so perfect for what's been going on in my head lately - about the nature of creative people - and how they think and where they take inspiration from. A reminder that it's not a bad thing to be a girl who loves eighteenth-century French literature and Latin epic and neuroplasticity and architecture and opera (though not Stravinsky, as I learned last night) and dance punk and London and Edinburgh and dressing up and grunging out - why limit possibilities for the sake of a good old-fashioned academic career.

Nobody is going to put this baby in a corner.

when i grow up

There's this relentless drumming voice inside my head. It goes a little something like this: PhD thesis submission in eight months. Over and over. You know how often men supposedly think about sex? That's how much I think about my PhD. It's frightful, really. The funniest thing though is that everyone seems completely astonished that I would rather stab HB pencils in my eyes than stay at King's for another year. I finished a four-year high school degree in three years and I finished a four-year University degree in three years. There is no way in hell that I'm finishing a three-year PhD programme in four years. I love my research - I love research in general - but I don't want to still be doing it this time next year. I've finally, pretty much, mostly decided that I don't want to stay in academia anymore and now that I've realised there's this whole, huge unexplored world out there - I can't wait to figure out what I want to do next. To think that I'd have to wait another year before being able to get out there and make some noise doesn't really appeal to me. And besides, I don't have any reason to stay another year - apart from the fact that I changed my topic after the first year and had to throw a year's worth of work away - but let's not speak of such things. When I was first starting, a friend of mine said that the most important part of doing a PhD was the research - not the teaching, not the paper giving - just the research. I took his advice quite literally and hardly did any teaching or conference-going, and now that I've finally, pretty much, mostly decided that I don't want to stay in academia (I adore the research element, but find most of the rest of it fairly restrictive) I'm so glad that my PhD primarily comprised three years of solid research.

I suppose my biggest problem with the academic world is that it encourages an extremely limited field of interest. I don't understand when or why research came to mean restriction. This is certainly not true for all of my colleagues, but I'm regularly astonished by the lack of interest academics show for any field or even subject outside their immediate research interest. As the kind of person who wants to know everything about everything, I don't understand why anyone would purposefully choose to cut themselves off from so many other areas of interesting information. The other thing that drives me crazy is a distinct lack of collaboration. Again, this is generalising to some extent, and if you work in a lab I'm sure the experience is quite different, but the closest most academics get to creative collaboration is jointly organising a conference or putting together an edited volume of papers. There's something profoundly clich�d about this, but working on a weekly magazine has introduced me to the joys of interacting with a team of incredibly bright, creative and dynamic people. It's such a nice thing to sit down together with people who have ideas and are knowledgeable about a variety of subjects and can bring all that knowledge to the table in order to enhance the quality of their professional work. An awful lot of academics don't have this breadth of knowledge - hardly surprising given that they've been working on the same, focused subject area for the last 15 years.

It's important that my work lets me to be creative, work with a group of inspiring people, and gives me free rein to pursue a wide range of interests. What that will be, I have no idea. But once I finish this damn PhD, I'll have plenty of time to figure it out. Having said that, suggestions on a postcard are most welcome...

whose fault is it, really

Given that I�m a Classics PhD student, I spend an awful lot of time reading obscure texts, written in a language that no one even speaks by men most people have never heard of. Which is something of a shame as much of what these dead chaps wrote is rather splendid and though I�m loathe to say so, still relevant today.*

My thesis deals primarily with one text � Lucan�s Pharsalia � an epic poem written in the first century under Nero (you remember, he played the fiddle while Rome burned) which looks back on the last days of the Roman Republic. This ain�t Homer or Virgil � there�s no dawn and her rosy red fingers here. Lucan�s Erichtho makes Homer�s Polyphemus [the Cyclops] look like the BFG, and his grotesque descriptions of battle are entirely devoid of the traditional conventions of honour and glory normally found in epic. It�s a no-holds-barred gory, raging tantrum of a text, which positively bemoans the previously unimaginable fall of the Roman Republic.

One of the things I most love about Lucan�s epic is that, as expected, he rails against the leaders of the civil war � Caesar and Pompey � but his purest expressions of loathing are reserved for the Roman people.

When Caesar enters Rome for the first time, Lucan writes beautifully of how the people are so terrified of what Caesar might do that they are prepared to do whatever he wants:

�So he speaks and enters a Rome thunderstruck by terror, because they believe that he will sack the walls with black fires and scatter the gods, as if he had captured Rome. This was the extent of their fear: they equate his wishes with his power. No favourable greetings, no feigned cries of happy uproar do they pretend; hardly have they room for hatred. The Palatine halls of Phoebus [i.e. the Temple of Apollo] are filled by a crowd of Fathers brought out from their lairs, though no one has the right to summon the Senate; the sacred chairs were not resplendent with the consul, no praetor � by law the next in rank � is present, and the empty curule chairs are missing from their place. Caesar was everything: the Senate-House listened to one man�s voice. The Fathers sat, prepared to vote in favour if he asks for tyranny, for temples for himself, for the slaughter and the exile of the Senate. Thank the gods his sense of shame exceeded Rome�s self-degradation.�

This is what I mean about the contemporary relevance of the ancient texts. This passage reminds me all too well of the fear-mongering that goes on in my own terrified country: the war on terror, anthrax, communists � you name it � if the politicians and the media are able to whip up enough fear, people are all too willing to give up their civil rights.

Lucan delivers a stinging reprimand against the people for such cowardly behaviour and, as the ultimate dressing-down, suggests that ultimately the people of Rome are to blame for their own downfall. Something we�d all do well to remember, especially comparing, say the difference in cost v public anger over the MP expenses scandal with the banks bailout. MPs were paid just over �93 million in expenses in 2007-08 [the most recent total figures I could find] whereas the bank bailout was �28.7 billion � more than five times the cost of annual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But which do you think most twisted the britches of the general public? Not the bank bailout, which hardly merited so much as a sip of tea being spat out the nose, but the MP expenses �scandal� which has hardly been out of the press since the story broke over the summer. Frankly, I don�t have a problem with MPs claiming for expenses (though I�m less happy about them claiming excessively, obviously) � in theory, these people are public servants (again, I might not be that enchanted by the behaviour of the current lot, but I agree with the position in principle) and it�s their job to look after the health of the country. �93 million over one year is not really that much money. �28.7 billion pounds is, however, A LOT of money. That taxpayer money went to bail out organisations with zero interest in the public welfare is absolutely mind-boggling. That the people of this country were ready to draw and quarter their MPs for a few thousand pounds worth of expenses and yet raised little more than an eyebrow when these same MPs gave shed-loads of taxpayer money to bail out the banking sector is just incomprehensible.

As Lucan says of the Romans, it�s not enough to blame the sender of the message when the recipient is equally culpable. Like Caesar and Pompey, some of our civil leaders may be dirty bastards, but who lets them get away with it?

*Loathe to say so as there exists a breed of classicist who feels the need to belittle our subject matter by constantly undermining it in �justifying the contemporary relevance of the ancient texts for the modern world�. We�re academics interested in knowledge, not in increasing profit margins, I don�t understand why there�s any need to forge bonds of contemporary relevance. That they exist is both happy coincidence and proof of the extraordinary nature of the quality of the writing and the subject matter of the texts.

utility sucks

"To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said � even when it takes the form of Kronman�s inspiring cadences � diminishes the object of its supposed praise."

~ Stanley Fish

My least favourite part of modern academia is its continuing commodification: the necessity for an education to mean something, to confer something, to be anything other than what it is and ought to be. And it's not just because I'm a classicist that I lament the demise of the humanistic education. It's because at least then we as a society felt we knew what an education ought to be and what the goal of a good education was. Now, because of the diversification of subjects into mainstream academia - hello film studies and hotel management, surely these things do not belong in modern universities? - we are less sure what should constitute a good modern education.

I'm not entirely sure when utility as a measure of judgement seeped into British Universities, but I'll wager it was sometime after 1970. The advent of the research councils in the late 90s meant the complete death of academic freedom in the UK. A contentious and controversial statement for sure, but look at it this way. Most students in this country do not complete a PhD unless they receive funding - in my case it's the AHRC which provides funding for Humanities students. A student will not even be encouraged by their department to submit an application for funding unless it is likely that the student will actually receive funding, as each department has a limited number of possible funding allocations per year. As the department knows that the AHRC only funds a certain kind of research, this is inevitably the kind of research that gets put forward and funded by the AHRC, and is thus the kind of research carried out in British Universities. Utility is one of those buzzwords greedily devoured by the AHRC and its funding panel - how does this add to the subject, to the canon, to the body of research - they want to know. This means that graduate students rarely get to tackle the big, important, interesting ideas as they're too busy analysing one sentence of an obscure text no one gives a damn about - but at least this obscurity guarantees 'utlity'.

I realise that Universities must find some method by which they can support themselves, whether it's by raising fees or through alumni donations, I certainly don't have an easy answer. But academia has always been about research and big ideas, but most importantly, about providing an environment of freedom and safety in which to carry out research and have these big ideas. As soon as the Universities start putting a price tag on ideas - and utility carries its own price tag, believe me - they quite obviously cease to be free. Learning is exciting, stimulating, and enriching. When did Universities move away from promoting these ideas?

In my second year viva last week, one of the main criticisms of my work was that I wasn't careful enough in 'preserving the conventions of academic presentation.' The marker actually said, 'Crystal must preserve the conventions of academic presentation' and I couldn't help thinking - is this what we've really come to? Are we, as academics, more concerned with the proper citation of footnotes than with the big ideas? Sadly, I think for many the answer is yes. And for the next generation, who may arrive with big ideas, we're browbeaten into submission by the current staff, so that by the end of the process we've just given up. And the saddest thing is that this focus on technicalities only disguises the fact that what's really missing are those very same big ideas. This obsession with utility and convention and presentation only leads us farther away from truly revolutionary thinking - from making those big breakthroughs. You might think that in a field like Classics there aren't really any breakthroughs left to be made. But, for example, most of the old guard are too busy lamenting the death of Greek and Latin teaching in schools to even discuss the merits and possibilities of learning via translations of classical texts. While the rest of the literary world is running away with classical discourse and debate, stealthily stealing it straight out of the classicists hands, Classics dons are getting hung up on the fact that their students are occasionally using poor grammar in their essays or reading from the translation instead of the original. So what!

Academia has become, well ... just so boring. It used to be that the most brilliant minds in all fields came from within the academic tradition: the Cricks and Watsons, the Eliots and Wittgensteins, but none of these people would stand a chance in today's academic culture. First of all, these days a paper without footnotes would get thrown straight in the fire, and forget any sort of academic career if you aren't publishing regularly. It's just all a bit depressing. But thankfully, I've at least least come to one conclusion: this is my PhD. These are three years of my life and my future we're talking about. I'm not about to let any 'conventions' or ticked boxes get in my way. You can stuff your obsession with utility. I'll take my big ideas any day of the week...

and now a word from our sponsors

With year two PhD deadline rapidly approaching (two weeks!), postings here are bound to be quite sporadic over the next few weeks. There's just too much to do to overstretch writing energies.

Though having just returned from the fascinating 1st of the series of this year's Reith Lectures, I can't help but want to make a brief mention. This year's lectures are given by Harvard professor, Michael Sandel, and are entitled 'A New Citizenship'. The audience is primarily invite only (and included David Miliband and Ken Livingstone, among others) so tickets are rather hard to come by. And while I initially inwardly groaned when our host, Sue Lawley, mentioned that there would be plenty of time for questions, the distinguished audience meant that what actually took place was one of the most intelligent and stimulating debates on morality in democratic, capitalist society I've ever witnessed in a public forum. There are four lectures in the series and all are being broadcast on Radio 4 so definitely take the time to listen to a timely and fascinating discussion on what it means to be a citizen in today's society.

I wish I had more time to write about Sandel's lecture and my thoughts on what he had to say, but I fear it shall have to wait for another time. At present, I have a more important man in my life and he's very demanding...

hard times ahead?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/arts/07grad.html?_r=1&em

This article is depressing, given that I'm a year away from completing my PhD.

I suppose I'm luckier than a lot of other doctoral students in that I have my fingers in a few other pies outside of academia. I also figured out rather quickly that getting bogged down in teaching undergrad classes (i.e. serving as cheap departmental labour) and organising seminars doesn't get you hired and competes with your primary goal: research and publication.

Getting something published during your doctoral years (at least in the Humanities) is what will set you apart from other applicants - not how many teaching hours you did or conferences you organised. Getting out there, meeting other academics, and making good connections is a good idea as well. For if you know other academics and they know you, they might be better placed to help you out when it comes time to job hunt.

Maybe it's because I'm optimistic by nature, but I refuse to believe that there won't be any jobs out there when I finish or that I'll have a problem finding one, if academia is indeed where I decide to stay. Why on Earth would anyone put themselves through a PhD otherwise?

To all the Frenchmen that I've loved before

Like all other PhD's, mine is obscure. It has something to do with a poet, long dead, who wrote in a dead language, about the glory days of the Roman republic, dead before he even started writing. You get the point.

So my brilliant plan was to look at the nachleben of this poet and his poem (Lucan and The Pharsalia) in seventeenth and eighteenth century France. The 18th century translation is in prose and is really quite lovely - very civilised. The 17th century translation is a pain in the ass, to put it mildly. Even the translator's contemporaries thought he was smoking crack - one calls his verse translation "obscure gobledygook".

So I put it to you, native French speakers and Francophiles, what in the world is he on about in the following passage? I've tried to translate it literally - it makes no sense. I've tried to translate it with a little poetic license - it still makes no sense. And just to make things difficult, I can't even consult the Latin for a hint because our lovable French translator has gone off on a poetic tangent and there ain't nothing in the Latin which roughly corresponds. Typical...

And before you tell me my French is all wrong and strange and completely bizzare, I say to you that's the 17th century!

Sur tous ceux que le Ciel abandonne aux Tyrans, / Sa disgrace est cuisante, et sa travaux sont grands: / Rome que tant de Rois voyoiens comme leur Reinne. / Ne peut qu�avec horreur se former a la chairne, / La honte de ses fers en augmente le poids / et cette Reine enfin ne peut souffrir les Rois. / A qui Dieux tout-puissants, qui gouvernex le terre.