My Love Affair with Hitchcock

Today it was announced that for the first time since 1962, the number one "best" film in Sight and Sound's movie poll is not Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, but rather Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.  Very interesting indeed.

If I was picking a favourite between the two, I'd have to say I would have gone with Vertigo myself, though I'm not sure I would or could say with any confidence that either was the best film ever made or even my favourite.  In fact, I'm pretty sure Vertigo isn't even my favourite Hitchcock.

Alfred Hitchcock was the first director whose films I sought out precisely because he had directed them.  I think I saw my first Hitchcock film when I was about 10, on television in one of those grainy, jumpy, washed out versions - so much different from the digitally restored wonders you can buy on DVD and Blu-ray now.  I'm pretty sure it was Dial 'M' for Murder, and I can remember to this day my mom telling me how clever the solution to the murder case was.  I thought it was wonderful.

North by Northwest, Rear Window, Rebecca, and Suspicion followed that first experience.  Mom and I liked to visit the local Family Video and raid the Classics and Oscars shelves.  I'm assuming this is how we came across Vertigo, which blew my mind with its twistiness and its sudden, shocking ending, with its psychological suspense and tortured romance.  I can remember very clearly walking home from school one day shortly after I'd seen it (I think I was 13) and telling a friend the plot.  I don't think she thought it was quite as amazing as I did.

And there were other Hitchcocks - Spellbound and Marnie (which also made a huge impression and sent me off in search of the source novel - I remember I saw both these on VHS from the public library), the rather laughable The Birds, To Catch a Thief, Psycho, Strangers on a Train (watched on a date with Tim on the family room sofa), Notorious (watched on our lovely flatscreen in our basement suite).  The most recent Hitchcock I've seen was (finally) Rope.  To this day, shamefully, I've never seen any of the silent or British films, which makes me a terrible philistine.  But, there's lots of time for those yet.

I feel really lucky that the BFI in London is running a giant retrospective of Hitchcock's films this summer and autumn.  I've already booked tickets to see Dial 'M' for Murder (in 1950s-style 3D), Vertigo, Marnie, and Rear Window.  I'd also like to get up to see Rebecca.  I'm really looking forward to seeing these films in a theatre after all these years.

A Montmaravian Update

I discovered shortly after posting my review of the first two FitzOsborne books, that Michelle Cooper is unfortunately not published in Britain.  Thus, the third book in the trilogy, The FitzOsbornes at War isn't going to be available in Britain any time soon.  So, I've ordered it up from Australia from Gleebooks of Sydney.  (Michelle Cooper has put together a handy guide on how to order her books from North America and Europe here.)  Now I just need to be patient.

All this reminds me of a time, several years ago, when I ordered books and CDs from overseas with much more regularity.  I think the last book I ordered from Australia was Alison Croggon's The Singing, the fantastic last book in her Pellinor quartet.  I also used to order up CDs from the British and (at least once) German Amazon websites, back in the days when I couldn't get my favourite European metal albums in brick-and-mortar CD stores or from iTunes.  Thankfully, iTunes seems to cover all the music I enjoy now.

In retrospect, those were probably rather expensive undertakings.  But I was a book and music obsessed undergraduate with disposable income then.

I should mention that if you are in the UK, you can download the Kindle edition of The FitzOsbornes at War for about £10.  (It's about twice that to order a hard copy from Oz).  However, I'm a huge codex fancier and I already have the first two books and why would I want to ruin a complete, matching set?  So, no ebooks for me.  Not any time soon at least.

Review: Books One and Two of The Montmaray Journals

Australian edition

I've just finished reading two fantastic books: Michelle Cooper's A Brief History of Montmaray and The FitzOsbornes in Exile.  Happily for me, The Montmaray Journals are a trilogy, so there's also The FitzOsbornes at War to read.  I'm dying to find out what happens to my new favourite fictional family.  Updated:  As I've discovered today that Michelle Cooper does not have a UK publisher, I'll be ordering the third book from Australia.  The third book comes out in the US/Canada in October.

A Brief History of Montmaray is the journal of the sixteen-year-old Princess Sophia FitzOsborne of Montmaray, a tiny island located in the Bay of Biscay, founded in the 16th century by an Cornish aristocrat who fled England after an affair with Katherine Howard (Henry VIII's fifth wife).  There is of course no such island but Cooper has created a fascinating history for this fictional island and interweaves it with real history (the island helped fight off the Spanish Armada and the castle's curtain wall boasts a hole from when Napoleon fired on the island).

US edition

From the beginning, this book bears a distinct but pleasant resemblance to Dodie Smith's classic I Capture the Castle.  Sophie lives in the crumbling castle of Montmaray (ahem, fortified house) with her young tomboy sister Henry, her intellectual cousin Veronica, and her mad uncle King John.  She also has an older brother Toby, away at school in England, bankrolled by stern Aunt Charlotte, the only family member with any money.  And she has a terrible crush on the housekeeper's son, Simon Chester.  Though everyone in the family is an HRM or HRH, these characters are not privileged at all - everyone helps clean and cook and take care of their animals.  They're also extremely cut off from the world, with only a dodgy wireless and newspapers from passing ships to keep them informed.

However, when two SS men turn up one day, the seemingly distant Spanish Civil War and the increasing power of the German Nazis begin to have ramifications for Montmaray.  One of the men is a real historical figure, Otta Rahn, who is convinced that the Holy Grail might be located on Montmaray.

Gorgeous US edition

The second book, The FitzOsbornes in Exile follows the family from 1937 to just before the outbreak of the World War Two.  Sophie and her family are now in England, having fled Montmaray (I won't say exactly why, but you can perhaps guess).  All of sudden, they are indeed moving in high society, among Mitfords and Kennedys.  However, the girls especially are no longer able to conduct themselves as they choose, now living under their Aunt Charlotte's authority.

And what Aunt Charlotte wants most of all is to see Sophie, Veronica, and Toby married well, which is problematic, as Veronica is (by society standards) overly intellectual and overly political, which is rather troublesome in the days of Appeasement.  And Toby, the new king of Montmaray, is gay.  Veronica and Sophie don't care, but they are also acutely aware that homosexuality is in fact illegal, so Toby had best not get caught.

This book follows Sophie and her family through three London Seasons, through helping Basque refugee children after the horrific bombing of Guernica, and on their quest to reclaim Montmaray from the Nazis.  The last entry of Sophie's diary in this book is 23 August 1839.  I read the last pages with a sense of dread.  The Germans marched into Poland on 1 September 1839.

US edition

So now I'm burning to find out what will happen to these characters in World War II.  The bombing of London is coming; new opportunities are going to open up for women; and the men will go off to fight.  Simon and Toby have both already signed up for the RAF.

These are fantastic books, especially for anyone interested in the Brideshead Revisited/interwar era and stories of crumbling aristocratic, eccentric families.  Cooper has obviously done her research, down to very small details (for instance, that von Rippentrop earned the nicknamed von Ribbensnob while ambassador in London).  There is a lot of history and politics and diplomacy, so that these books actually reminded me a bit of the political manoeuvring in Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief books.

Celebratory; Plus, A Word of Warning

Yesterday brought with it some very good news.  My partner Tim has finally found a job.

Ever since we arrived in Oxford back in September, Tim has been looking for work.  We came over here aware that the jobs market in the UK was not as robust as it was in Saskatchewan (how could it be?  Saskatchewan is booming), but we never expected it would take so long or so many job applications (Tim thinks it must be nearing 100) to find a job.

So, this is the word of warning bit.  If you, dear reader, you happen to be reading this blog ahead of coming to Oxford as a student (or to the UK in general) and you are bringing your partner with you, please know that the jobs market here is extraordinarily competitive at the moment, especially for young people.  The number that keeps being touted is 20% youth unemployment (!).  Also, Oxford seems to be filled to bursting with people with multiple degrees looking for jobs.  Several of the jobs Tim applied for had lines in their regrets letters to the effect of 'We had more applications than we had ever expected...'  One entry-level job ended up with 240 applications.  One, two-days-a-week research position went to someone with two PhDs.

So, begin searching early.  Apply widely - part-time jobs, temporary positions, etc.  Get on with a recruiting agency.  And hope for the best.  I know other graduate students and their partners who are having a great deal of trouble at the moment.

Tim's quite looking forward to his new job, which is happily full-time and with the university, so now he too can have free access to the Bodleian, the colleges, and the Botanic Garden.  It will be strange not having him at home all the time.  Hopefully his working regular hours will encourage me to research and write on more regular hours, leaving evenings and weekends mostly free.

Working in the Library

Somehow these last few days, I've hit upon a working routine that seems to be going quite well.  For the first time all year, I've started working in my college's beautiful Victorian library.  I think I was afraid before that I would take a table away from some poor stressed undergraduate while term was on.  In any case, now the library is all but empty and usually peopled by fellow graduate students, grinding away on their theses.  Yesterday, there were four of us, a political theorist, a geographer, a medievalist, and me, each happily encamped at one of the (apparently still original) oak tables, each in his or her own bay of the library.  I seem to be sitting at the end of the classics section and by the beginning of literary theory.  It's nice to have a work space that feels like your own.

I've only been working on Chapter Two in the library for the last week, so perhaps psychologically it has clicked that when I'm sitting at my nice oak table, I should be planning and writing about silver fork novels and dandies.

During my Master's degree, all of us English grad students had offices on two floors of the main humanities library.  It was great - first of all, you had your own space: a place to surreptitiously nap, a place to store books and notes and perhaps coax potted plants into liveliness, and a place to stash life-giving snacks.  The other joy of this set up was the ability to wander about when bored and bother your fellow students.  I found it was really useful to talk to other people who were having the same problems working or writing or researching.  Research can be lonely; human contact is hugely beneficial.

Working in the college library has allowed me a similar degree of socialising with my fellow students, which has been wonderful.  Because there are no university-related seminars or lectures running over the long vacation (which is indeed very long - term doesn't start again until the beginning of October) I had been wondering if I was going to wither away for lack of seeing anyone I knew.  Crisis averted!

The other plus to looking in the library is that if you need a little mental break while your unconscious figures out the details of the paragraph you're agonising over, you can gaze up at the lovely painted tiles on the ceiling.  (Pictured above - can you spot the boss of the Green Man?)

Music of Trinity Term 2012

This is possibly a silly series to have running on a blog, but alas, I've started and I don't know how to stop.  Without further ado, music I listened to obsessively in Trinity Term 2012.

1) Lana Del Rey, "Blue Jeans".  I saw the music video for this on a random afternoon in the Mansfield MCR and for some reason, fell for it, even if it does have a rapped section.  (Not a hip hop fan, not even a little bit).  This was my soundtrack for the end of the Easter vac and the beginning of Trinity.  I will in particular always remember listening to this song the day I hopped up to London and saw the Westminster Cathedral for the first time and went to Teri Terry's book launch for Slated (a great YA dystopia, by the way, and coming out in North America next year).

Thoughts on Going Home

Somehow, I've managed to amass two homes (or possibly three).

We went home to Saskatchewan for the first time since moving to the UK at the end of June and stayed for two weeks.  We both wondered if it would feel strange to go "home" and see our families, friends, and old haunts again after having been in a different country for nine months.  For the first time, I really felt like an Adult Child, making the run back home.

Before moving over here, Tim and I been out of our respective familial nests for two years and had got pretty used to the weekly-ish Sunday dinner routine.  Going to my parents' involved dinner, dessert, and depending on the time of year Mad Men, Masterpiece Theatre, or Inspector Lewis.  (Also, Apollo 13, Remember the Titans, and The Bourne Identity, all of which Dad had practically memorized as they played disproportionately on TV.)  Dinners at Tim's parents' sometimes involved backyard fires.

But we had never left for an extended period of time and come back again.  Surprisingly, this did not feel at all strange, except in its non-strangeness.  We spent a week with each set of parents (happily located in the same city), visited many friends and relatives and did "Saskatoon" things.

Wandering around the University of Saskatchewan campus, which always looks its best in the summer...

 Going to the Jazz Festival

 Popping in and out of shops on Broadway

And, a first for me, canoeing down the river.  NB: I did not in fact do any canoeing.  But I was in the canoe and had a great view of the river valley.

And it was while I was doing all these home things in Saskatoon that I realized Oxford has actually become "home" too.  I would catch myself saying, "At home, the undergraduates have left but the city has been flooded with tourists" or "At home, wine is incredibly cheap and housing is shockingly expensive."  It was strange to think that my hometown of 24 years and Oxford, where my residence is necessarily more transitory, are both home.

And then there is a third home, which isn't so easy to visit.  A lovely basement suite near the university that was home for two years but which we can't revisit, well, because different people live there now and a break and enter would probably have to be involved.  That home will always be special because it was the first one Tim and I shared together.  It was full of our furniture, our books; we were allowed to put pictures up on the walls.  When we first moved into our little university housing flat in Oxford, it had felt rather temporary and not quite ours.  I had forgotten that feeling until we got back from our trip home to Saskatchewan.  This flat will never feel as much like home as our last place.  Sadly, the best we can do to revisit that good old basement suite is watch the video we took before we moved and spy on the yard while driving slowly down the back alleyway (sadly, I don't think the garden's been kept up this year, though I did see that our chives were thriving!)

I discovered in the last days of our trip that two weeks wasn't quite enough and for one evening in particular, really felt quite sad to be going home to Oxford, especially since we don't have plans to go back home to Canada again for another year or so.  But now we're back and slowly getting over our post-travel jet lag (and accompanying flus), I'm happy to get back to work and to make the most of what Oxford and the UK have to offer.

So, two (or three) homes.  I'm sure we will rack up quite a few more before all of this is over, what with the academic life and all that.

Micro Update

I'm still here.  Since last blogging, my first three terms at Oxford have come to an end, I've been home and come back again, and the weather has remained painfully unsummery.

Currently, I'm fighting off jet lag and a cold and working on finishing off Chapter Two.  More to come!

Officially DPhil: Transfer of Status Tales

Well, it's official.  As of this week, I am actually a true blue DPhil candidate.  Up until now, I was technically a PRS (Probationary Researcher Student), along with everyone else in the first year of the doctoral programme.

To recap - the steps that brought me here.

First of all, I had to write a 10,000 word piece of written work that ended up being the first chapter of my thesis ('Heroes and Hero-Worship in Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Glass Town and Angrian Writings, 1829-1836').  This was a painful process, mostly because writing can be quite agonizing and also because I had to do a fair bit of revision, which plunged me into a bout of grad school anxiety on topics such as 'What if I can never make this chapter good?', etc.  Of course, all unfounded fears.

I also had to produce a 1000-word thesis proposal and outline, which was not too hard, since I could readily adapt the proposal I used last fall for all my scholarship applications.  (None of which panned out, by the way.  Still sadly unfunded.  There's still next year, however!)

And then, the Transfer Interview (of Doom!).  Which was actually fine.  I didn't really worry about that interview with my two assessors because the interviews are only supposed to be half an hour to an hour long and, at the end of my master's degree, I had managed to survive a two-hour oral defence with three examiners.  Also, my supervisor had been quite positive about my chapter after revision and had kindly prepped me on questions that might come, ie: gender theory, thesis structure, methodology, etc.  So I was well-prepared going in.

I didn't really start to worry until two hours before my interview, when I had finished going through my chapter and reminded myself of the content of my outline and thought through what I would say should the dreaded question of methodology come up.  (My fellow DPhil Judyta has written a blog post on the issue of methodology re: the transfer interview.)  There was one snag, as the porter at Magdalen College first sent me off on a wild goose chase to the wrong quad, but I found my way easily enough after that.

My assessors were very merciful and told me right off the bat that they weren't going to recommend that I didn't transfer (which, as I kept reminding myself, isn't the end of the world anyway, as they do let you have another free try the next Michaelmas).  Huge sigh of relief, though.  I don't remember all that much of the interview, which was spent in a state of processing information and calculating when to stop speaking, making sure I was actually answering the questions I was asked.  Regular interview fugue state stuff.  And overall, again, as I kept reminding myself, it was really and truly useful to gain feedback on my chapter, approach, and plan for the thesis as a whole from two academics other than my supervisor.  It was a great opportunity to challenge my own ideas about the thesis and make me think about, for instance, alternate structures.

So, transfer sounds rather traumatic, but in the end, I think it's actually a great opportunity to check in, to make sure you're on the right track, and to force yourself to produce relatively finished written work, especially as the Oxford DPhil is much less structured than a North American doctoral program (coursework, comprehensive exams, then dissertation).  And, as the maximum word limit for the thesis is 100,000 words, I'm definitely at least 10% done now, and that's quite a good feeling!

My next check in will be my Confirmation of Status, which you apply for when you're within a chapter or chapter and a half of finishing your thesis.  It also requires submission of written work, a plan, and, as of this year, an interview.  Another hurdle to look forward to!

(Here's a link to another account of the dreaded Transfer Interview by Sophie, who went through all of this last year.  I read this before coming up to Oxford last summer and I think it made me feel better about the prospect of transferring.)

Planting Seeds

I'm partly writing this post to see if anyone else does this.

That is, consciously planting seeds in one's subconscious.

I'll explain.  As we all know, our subconscious never shuts down.  We dream at night; we discover the best comebacks after the moment has passed; we figure out the crossword clue days later.  When our conscious mind goes off to other things, the subconscious keeps on rolling.

When I know I need/want to write something and I have only the foggiest idea of what my argument or approach might look like, I've discovered it's useful to do two things.

1)  Write it out.  While organizing papers last night, I discovered a few sheets that had my preliminary planning for thesis Chapter Two on them.  One of them I had very boldly titled "Things I Know About Chapter Two" and contained really early notes on areas I wanted to cover, books I knew I needed to read, conclusions I thought I might draw.  I've discovered that almost freewriting out or brainstorming ideas on purpose and on paper really helps me to think better and sparks off ideas that often make perfect sense, seemingly out of nowhere. 

This is also how I came up with my Master's thesis topic.  I knew I wanted to do a thesis (I had originally signed up for the shorter project-based course), but I didn't know what I wanted to do it on and I figured that if I was going to make English Department staff go to all the administrative trouble of helping me switch programs, I had better have a decent idea of what I wanted to do.  So, I sat down with a piece of paper and wrote down the bits of English Literature that most interested me.  On that list were the Brontes, the Gothic, and Heathcliff, which eventually led into my thesis on Gothic masculinity in three Bronte novels.

Most recently, I've used this scattershot method to try to shape a conference paper abstract whose deadline is not so very far away.  I wrote down everything I thought might be interesting to talk about.  And then I did Step Number Two.

2)  Walk away and tell one's Subconscious to figure it out.  I couldn't push my idea any further, so I left my scribbled-over notebook pages and quite sternly told myself to take those ideas and come up with an argument, or at least, a narrowed down, more complete version of my initial ideas.  And lo and behold, later that day, I suddenly figured out the perfect primary work to use as the centre of my discussion.  (Which then led to an exploration of the town centre of Kidlington, as I already owned the book I wanted to use, but hadn't brought it to the UK with me.  So, off we went to the public library to pick it up).  Now, I still have to write the abstract and, if it's accepted, the paper itself, but my subconscious certainly seemed to have done something with the seeds I planted.

I think this is another area where academic writing and creative writing overlap, but it's hard to say.  As Robin McKinley has said in essays, the imagination (at least, mine) is not nearly as "biddable" as my academic writing brain.  But I'm trying.  I've told my subconscious that after Belladonna is finished and, hopefully, out on submission, I would really like it to come up with a nice juicy Victorian-style ghost story or sensation fiction sort of plot.  I'll just have to wait and see what it comes up with.  (I should also mention that I've been trying to help it along by reading Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, and M.R. James...)