A List: Adventures Since the End of September, Plus Photos

Some of my current work materials

Goodness, I've been a bad updater.  I intended last week to do a post on the excitement of the first two weeks of term, but now we're at the end of 3rd week already.  So, instead I offer up a list of my adventures since the end of September.

1)  I attended the SCWBI Agents' Party in London, where I was very brave and pitched my novel to four literary agents.  Pitching was terrifying at first but became easier when I reminded myself that agents are book nerds just like writers.  We're all just looking for a great book to read.  Now I need to finish my polish/proofread and make sure all my spellings are British (rather than Canadian or American: see my last post) and start sending it out.

2)  Having previously seen Vertigo as part of the BFI's Hitchcock retrospective, Tim and I also went to see Rear Window, which was also even more amazing on a big screen with great sound.  Also, I realized it's much easier to see what the characters in the other apartment buildings are up to on a big screen and in high resolution.  (As opposed to the fuzzy VHS version I'm sure I originally watched the film in).

3)  At the very beginning of First Week, Tim and I went back to London to see the Original Practices production of Twelfth Night at the Globe, starring the one and only Stephen Fry as Malvolio.  It was amazing and very funny, especially since they milked the comedy of men playing women (and in Viola's case, a man playing a woman playing a man) for all it was worth.

Before we went to the theatre, we popped into the famous Daunt Books in Marylebone and finally made it to Regent's Park.

4)  Also, in first week, I taught my first ever Oxford tutorial on Oscar Wilde (Paper 7 - the special author paper).  Now three weeks in, I must say I'm really enjoying myself.  It's lovely to get my teaching muscles working again.  Tutorial-style teaching is definitely very different from the teaching I did during my Master's degree of the University of Saskatchewan.  It's strange going from having, say 15-30 students down to just one.  At its best, the teaching resembles a supervision meeting or a really productive conversation, with ideas and interpretations zinging back and forth.

5)  Then we had EGO (English Graduates at Oxford) committee elections.  I will be serving on the committee for the second year in a row, this time as Academic Affairs Officer.  I'm really excited to be involved again and will aim to do my best.

6)  I'm also on the organizing committee for the graduate conference again this year.  We decided on the theme for the conference just a couple days ago: Object.  We're hoping to here some really interesting papers on materiality, tangibility, Thing Theory, and also more political/theoretical/critical objections.  A CFP will probably go out in December with an abstract deadline in March(ish).

7)  Last week, I also had the opportunity to hear a bit of a children's publishing celebrity speak.  The Oxford branch of the Society of Young Publishers hosted a public talk by David Fickling, head of the Random House imprint David Fickling Books, which publishes some of my very favourite authors in the UK: Linda Newbery, Kenneth Oppel, Margo Lanagan...  David Fickling was a fabulously energetic and enthusiastic speaker, running off onto fascinating tangents like some of my very best university professors.  He spoke really engagingly about what an editor must do (recognize talent, add energy, provide stability, communicate to the author).  It was fascinating to hear about the editor-author relationship from the editor's point of view, especially because unpublished writers tend to focus more on getting published and the submissions process.  Also, it was lovely to hear David speak so passionately about importance of publishing good books and great stories, rather than focusing on market issues.

8)  Last week I also got to meet another hero of mine, David Mitchell, who was in town at the Oxford Waterstones signing copies of his memoir Back Story.  If you haven't seen David Mitchell and his comedy partner Robert Webb in Peep Show or their sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look, do so.  Fantastic British comedy.

9)  My 9th adventure comes later today when the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Forum is hosting a tour of Oscar Wilde's rooms at Magdalen College, which I am very much looking forward to.

This image isn't related to anything in this post, except that autumn has come to my favourite churchyard by the English Faculty.

 And to close, some general thoughts on beginning the second year of my DPhil.  First of all, where did first year go?  It went by so quickly.  I'm a third done now!  But, really, everything feels a bit more comfortable this year.  I have friends inside and outside my program; I'm used to the city; I'm well into my research (though writing is still a struggle).  It's also scary, however, because I recently realized that instead of applying for scholarships next fall, I'll be applying for lectureships, post-docs, teaching roles and really thinking about the transition into an academic career.

Englishes: Canadian, British, American

My English is going to be a confused mishmash for the rest of my life.  But I'm okay with that.

This morning I listened to a really interesting interview on the CBC radio program As It Happens with American English professor Ben Yagoda, who tracks the increasing use of "Britishisms" in American English.  A fascinating topic (frankly though, this just makes sense to me - British words and slang are so much more fun than American ones and I've personally been adopting many of them ever since I read Harry Potter and saw Bridget Jones's Diary).

Ben Yagoda does this tracking on an incredibly interesting blog, Not One-Off Britishisms.

In reading through a bunch of the blog, I realized that between growing up in Canada and having now spent  a year in Britain, my vocabulary is steeped in Britishisms, though I find I can switch back and forth, mostly at will still.

In Canada, growing up, there weren't really any rules as to whether you used American or British or that amorphous thing called Canadian English.  I remember very clearly in Grade 2 being told that it was fine to use "favourite" or "favorite" on a spelling test.  Once we hit high school and university, the only real rule was to be consistent in one's spelling.  (Though generally, I think Canadians have a bias toward British spellings - except we are also pretty keen on zeds - "regularize" as opposed to "regularise").  I had one English professor who came out and specified that we must use British English in our essays (but he also had a soft spot for zeds).

Then I came over here.  I started using those s's in "ise/ize" words.  I even started using single quotes rather than double quotes (which was a bit hard).

And my spoken English changed, a bit.  I stopped talking about apartments and started using "flat".  Apparently Blackwell's is generally referred to as a "bookshop" rather than a "bookstore".  I learned that "athletics" means "track and field"; I've trained myself to say "football" rather than "soccer".  I know all about the horror of "roundabouts" (vs. "traffic circles").  I haven't had much cause to talk about gas or petrol, so I'm not sure which would come out most easily.

Because of this dual Canadian/British linguistic experience, I found reading Dr. Yagoda's blog rather interesting, because some things that sounds pretentious or awkward to his American ear either have never sounded strange to me or now just sound normal.  For instance, the British "made redundant" as opposed to "laid off" (something you hear a fair bit in an age of high unemployment).  Or "piece of kit" or uniform or equipment.  That's not pretentious; that's the legit way to talk about, say, your rowing uniform, etc.

Also, hilariously, Yagoda identifies the phrase "'at university' as setting "a news standard for conspicuous and gratuitous use of Britishisms (CAGUOBs), even for the New Yorker."  Americans would of course say "at college".  Canadians usually refer to university, rather than college, which can have a rather different meaning (community college, the College of Arts & Science, etc.).  And if you say "college" at Oxford or Cambridge, then you're into a whole new field of meanings.

Ah, English, such a fun mongrel language.

Music of Long Vacation 2012

I suppose now that it's halfway through 1st Week, I'd better round off the long vacation by telling you what songs I listened to over and and over again between June and the end of September.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, we'll start off with yet more Florence + the Machine, which is fast becoming one of my favourite bands ever.  For some reason 'Dog Days Are Over' really got me this summer.  Also, I've discovered it's a great song to run to: 'Run fast for your mother and fast for your father / Run for your children for your sisters and brothers / Leave all your love and your longing behind you / Can't carry love with you if you want to survive.'  Slightly apocalyptic, no?

Late Summer Adventures, Part Three: York, Bath, and London

Now that term has started, it seems like a good time to finish my run down of my late summer adventures.  The last adventure involved showing my very good friend around England on her first trip over here.

We did a little bit in Oxford, including seeing the Hysteria at the Oxford Playhouse, which was really cool, though also very strange (especially at the end, but it had Freud for a main character, so what do you expect?)

Then we left Tim behind and took the train up to York for two nights.  I love York.  It's such a lovely city to wander around in.  You don't even need a map; you can just dive down side streets and snickelways and if you get lost, you just look for the massive Minster towers to tell you where you are.

Mickelgate Bar

Inside the Minster

Highlights including going through a darling antique store, taking a river cruise down the Ouse (oh dear, it rhymes), and of course visiting the Minster.  Even though I was just in York last November, I'm really keen to go back again, especially since I still haven't seen the Railway Museum.

 Then we went to Bath for a day.  I had my first ever spa and thermal mineral water experience, which was good fun.  Then we hit the town: Bath Abbey, the Roman baths, a picnic by the Royal Crescent, the Fashion Musuem, and little shops in between.  I'd forgotten just how pretty a city Bath is.

Bath Abbey

Pulteney Bridge

Delightful shop, full of ribbons, buttons, and other odds and ends

Then it was off to London.  We stayed in empty London School of Economics self-catering student accomodation in Drury Lane which worked really well and was not very expensive by central London standards, I think.  London highlights: dinner at the Wolseley (an art deco restaurant that used to be a car dealership), Phantom of the Opera, the Buckingham Palace State Rooms and the Queen's Gallery (showing an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings - definitely a man ahead of his time), the British Museum, the Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey.

The Tower of London.  We discovered no one actually knows where Anne Boleyn was held before her execution.

Glorious Westminster Abbey.

 On our last night, Des and I had dinner down the street at Sarastro's, a fantastic restaurant done up like a particularly over-the-top opera house, complete with a string quartet performance, followed by opera arias.  Des reports that the food was good, to boot.  Then we headed over the the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House for a contemporary ballet performance which was...interesting.  I'm a bit traditional when it comes to ballet, I suspect, and I really like it best when it tells a story.  But it was a good experience.

And then Des sadly had to go back to Canada!  Alas, but, speaking for myself, I had a fabulous time playing tour guide.

Also, all credit for the lovely photos goes to Des.  Having been all these places before, I didn't bother to take any photos, which is a problem when I then wanted to illustrate our travels for the blog.

Des is also an animator back in Vancouver.  You can see more of her work here and here.

Late Summer Adventures, Part 2: BAVS 2012

In my previous post on my late summer adventures, I wrote about our Peak District vacation.  The actual reason for being in the Peak District at all was so I could attend the first two days of BAVS 2012, the annual conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies, hosted this year by the University of Sheffield.

Day One
After some trepidation relating to transport (I had to drive myself there without getting lost and park without injury to people or property), I arrived at The Edge conference centre, which feels brand new and was purpose built for event just like these.  A number of student housing buildings surrounded the conference centre itself, providing perfect accomodation for out of town delegates.

The conference kicked off with a keynote from Francis O'Gorman in which he discussed the idea of IMPACT, so crucial to all those funding applications (sigh), and also the concept of the present-day relevance and influence of particular writers or thinkers.  Do relevance and influence make someone worth studying?

Then it was off to the panels, a veritable smorgasbord of Victorian options, with six panels for each session.  I took in "Ethical Sexualities" first and learned about parallels in the language used to describe vivisection and pornography, about early obscenity law in England (which made a special point of excluding works of art, even those racy French novels), and about Weeds, Jerome K. Jerome's sexually fraught (and pseudonymously published) follow-up to Three Men and a Boat.  Definitely a side of Jerome K. Jerome I knew nothing about!

After, there was a panel on "Value at the Turn of the Century."  My favourite paper here was Sonny Kandola's reading of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey as a vampire novel in everything but name, using aesthetic, imperial, and class lenses.

The postgraduate forum followed next, on the subject of publishing one's first article, with much useful advice given.  I also had the opportunity to meet a representative from Maney Publishing, who happens to be the managing editor of several journals, including Bronte Studies.

Then, dinner, where I happily met several other graduate students working in Victorian studies, mostly in English and History.

Day Two
I should perhaps mention that, like much of the rest of the summer, it was chilly, cloudy, and then downright rainy in Sheffield during the conference.  Coats were very much the order of the day, especially as some of the conference rooms could be rather cool.

I began my day with a panel on "The Ethics of Emotion", which was fascinating.  Katherine Inglis did an in-depth analysis of the much-discussed death of Little Nell, comparing her to "Florentine Venuses," anatomical waxworks produced in Florence from the 1770s on.  Creepy, but very neat.  Arlene Young had another take on Dickens and emotion, and the panel was finished off by Nadine Muller, who gave a talk on the economics, ethics, and aesthetics tied up in the figure of the mid-Victorian widow.  (This was also the first presentation I had seen supported by a Prezi, which I'm now dying to try out).  This talk got me thinking about the role of the widower in Victorian literature, which I suspect isn't a figure loaded with as much cultural anxiety as the anamolous widow, but perhaps it merits investigation.  For my own work, I will be considering Hindley and Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights, both widowers.

Then I attended the packed session on the digital humanities, which was great fun as the presentations mostly consisted of the speakers telling us about their pet projects, including: Dino Felluga on Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net and NINES, Ian Gregory on GIS and the Lake District, Lisa Hager on The Journal of Victorian Culture Online (which included discussion of a Mrs. Beeton cooking contest), and Adrian Wisnicki on deciphering and then digitizing one of Dr. Livingstone's field journals using multispectral imaging.  All very cool.

Some more serious digital humanities issues came up as well, including the eternal question of how all this work will be evaluated by Tenure and Promotion committees who are used to the academic journal article and monograph style of academic work.  Also, how do you make sure your project stays accessible as technologies change?  Or, do you embrace the ephemerality of the web?  I was intrigued by Lisa Hager's suggestion that the blog post is its own particular genre of academic writing and one that students should be taught.  This is something I've thought about a bit when writing for Great Writers Inspire.

Then I took in my last panel, "Masculine Economies", before heading back to my Rivelin Valley cottage for the last time to pack.  This panel included discussion of Crimean War trench art and the domestication of the battlefield souvenir, as well as the issue of male beauty in Jane Eyre and The Picture of Dorian Grey and mutiny and the mutineer in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

The next morning, I successfully drove myself through four roundabouts (happily mostly empty as it was early Saturday morning) on Sheffield's ring road and returned my rental car.  Then I headed home to my next adventure: showing my best friend from Canada around England.

Final BAVS-related thoughts:  I really enjoyed my first BAVS conference and I plan to go again.  I might even see if I can get out to next year's combined BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA conference in Venice...  I also appreciated that there was a large postgraduate presence and the postgraduate panel, which made me feel rather at home.  Also, it was lovely to finally meet a few academics I had been following on Twitter over the summer, including Nadine Muller and Jessica Cox.  Also, the facilities and the organization were top notch.

One Year in Oxford

Port Meadow sunset

One year ago today, Tim and I took a First Great Western train from Paddington Station and arrived in Oxford to set up housekeeping.

I must say, this has been a very quick year.

Lots of school - reading, writing, listening, learning.  A fair bit of travel (London, Edinburgh, York, Bath, Portsmouth, Salisbury, Sheffield).  Not as much noveling as there should have been, but I did become part of SCWBI British Isles and have met many fellow writers.

A good year all in all.

But, yikes, only two more to go!  And then who knows where we'll end up next.

Late Summer Adventures, Part One: The Peak District

Why, hello.  The blog has been rather quiet lately, hasn't it?  I think I have a good excuse - I've barely been at home in the last two and a half weeks.

First, Tim and I took advantage of the August bank holiday (and the fact that I had to be in Sheffield for two days at the end of August for a conference anyway), and had a wee Peak District vacation.  I felt a bit like Elizabeth Bennet the whole time, though there were no Mr Darcys to be seen, sopping wet or otherwise.

We stayed in a little country cottage, with a great view across the Rivelin Valley to the hills beyond.  Oh, the hills.  Coming from Saskatchewan, whose southern half is extraordinarily flat, it was lovely to see hilly country, all partitioned into pasture land for cows and sheep.

We took a bus to Peveril Castle, which is Norman and still has a standing tower and bits of walls.  We also wandered around the completely delightful and literally named Castleton.  And we took the tour through the Peak Cavern, which marked the first time I had ever been inside a cave.

And then, we rented a car.  Because we were out in the country and therefore without great transit links, I figured a car would be the easiest way to get to and from my conference site and get down to Chatsworth.  Of course, this meant that for the first time ever, I had to drive in the UK, on the "wrong" side of the road!  Happily, I discovered that the driver's controls are set up exactly the same as they are in North America.  I had had visions of the gas and brakes being reversed and thought of the horrors that could ensue.  Having cycled around Oxford for a year, I was pretty used to staying in the left lane.  What I wasn't used to was 1) downtown Sheffield's horrifying, multi-lane roundabouts and 2) keeping to the right of my lane, so as not to hit cyclists or parked cars.

But it all turned out all right and by end of the trip I was confident enough to actually go the speed limit, even though the roads were much curvier and narrower than the ones I was used to.  Especially on the way to Chatsworth, I ended up driving on some very narrow country lanes that could only accomodate one car at a time.  I don't know how British drivers don't get killed in head-on collisions all the time, going up and down hills and around corners on roads like that.

We both really liked Chatsworth, especially the library.  Pride and Prejudice (2005, the one with Keira Knightley) fans might recognize the house as the one they used for Pemberley.

We also liked the nearest attraction to us, easily reached by the public footpaths - the Rivelin itself, which once powered up to twenty mills, including some of Sheffield's famous cutlery making ones.  It was great fun to walk along it and see the various man-made weirs and canals.

 And then Tim had to head back to Oxford, leaving me to attend to first two days of the annual conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies, otherwise known as BAVS 2012.

More to come...

Review: The FitzOsbornes at War, by Michelle Cooper

Australian edition

Having thoroughly enjoyed the first two books in the Montmaray Journals trilogy, A Brief History of Montmaray and The FitzOsbornes in Exile (reviewed here), I was very keen to read the final book, The FitzOsbornes at War.

Because Michelle Cooper unfortunately does not have a British publisher, I ordered up the book from Gleebooks in Australia.  I was told the book would arrive in 10-15 working days.  It showed up much faster than that, arriving just under a week later!  And then I read it in about 24 hours.  Cooper uses a lovely, clear prose style for Princess Sophia's journal, so that the novels are all very fast reads.

At the end of Book Two, which leaves the royal FitzOsborne family (Sophia, her brother Toby and sister Henry, plus cousin Veronica and half-cousin Simon) just before the outbreak of the Second World War.  The three things most on my mind when I finished were: 1) What would happen to Toby and Simon, who had already signed up for the RAF, 2) What opportunities would become available for the girls, whose London lives in Book Two had consisted in large part of their aunt trying to make proper aristocratic marriage matches for them, and 3) Would any of the FitzOsbornes, all well-drawn, sympathetic characters, die in the war?

US edition - out October 2012

This third Montmaray book, like its forbears, combines fictional characters and their equally fictional island kingdom of Montmaray with actual historical events.  As in the previous novels, Michelle Cooper does an astoundingly good job of mixing the fictional and the factual in believable ways.  The novel provides the reader with a great deal of historical detail about life on the British home front during the war, from the cookery guidelines Sophia helps to write (attempting to convince people to cook with a lot of root vegetables in the face of rationing) to the realities of bombing raids and blackouts.  Cooper also highlights aspects of the war that most general readers wouldn't necessarily be aware of, such as the not exactly neutral state of Franco's Spain and the interrogation of German prisoners of war in Kensington Gardens.  (I wasn't aware of these things and I consider myself a bit of a WWII buff.)

And throughout the war are interwoven the fates of the FitzOsbornes from the outbreak of war to the summer of 1944.  I got answers to all my questions.  1) Simon and Toby definitely become involved in the war, with Toby flying fighter planes and facing a great deal of danger.  I worried along with Sophie what was to become of both young men.  2)  Sophie and Veronica and even socialite Julia from the first two books take on wartime service: Sophie in the Food Ministry, Veronica with the Foreign Office putting her knowledge of Spanish to good use, and Julia serving as an ambulance driver.  3)  And yes, a beloved character dies, which had me absolutely bawling.

I was very impressed by the FitzOsbornes final, brave, and actually rather believable plan to take back Montmaray from the Germans.  I was also pleased by the epilogue written by Sophia in the 1948, which explains the post-war fates of the characters, including children, professions, and the ultimate fate of Montmaray.

Now, I have a very few quibbles regarding the series overall.  Throughout the first two books, I wondered how the author would come up with a satisfying ending for Toby, whose homosexuality is definitely part of the story.  He is accepted by his family, but homosexuality was still illegal in Britain at this time.  (See, for instance, the sad story of Alan Turing, codebreaker at Bletchley Park and father of computer science, who was prosecuted for his homosexuality in 1952.)  Another tricky aspect of the story I wondered over was the post-war fate of the main characters, who belong to a royal family, but who will enter into a Britain dominated by the Labour government, nationalization, and the decline of the aristocracy.  Cooper resolves these problems in ways that are eminently satisfying to the reader who is invested in these characters' welfare.  On the other hand, the ending, dare I say it, might be a bit too happy and easy?  It's hard to say.

My other quibble is perhaps a little harder to explain.  I sometimes felt that Sophia, whose siblings and friends are involved in major ways in the war and the politics surrounding it, especially as the royal family of a technically combatant nation, sometimes came off as slightly ignorant or indifferent to the historical events happening around her.  I know part of this is likely a narrative device, to provide the contemporary teen (or adult) reader with historical and political information as Sophie learns it.  I am also aware that Sophia is not nearly as politically minded as Veronica.  But it sometimes seemed that Sophie should have had more of an interest in, say, the Italian front, and this made her characterization seem slightly uneven at times.

These are small quibbles, and don't detract from the overall strength of the trilogy as a whole.

To finish, I will also say that I was impressed by the way that Cooper handles the sexuality of her characters, which by the third book have almost all entered adulthood.  They discuss and consider their own attitudes toward sexual experience prior to and after marriage and think critically about how their views mesh with those of 1930s and 40s "Society".  Veronica even comes out against matrimony, as a clearly thought through stance.  Because we have watched Veronica's intellectual development and her feminist politics, this rather unorthodox position on marriage isn't all that surprising and reflects her principles (especially since she would lose her job at the Foreign Office if she married).  Sophia depicts two sexual experiences, not in any explicit detail, but certainly in ways that illuminate her character and relationships with men.

Overall, this is a fabulous historical YA series and I feel rather sorry for readers (like my mom) in North America who have to wait for the October release date to find out what happens to the FitzOsbornes.

Out on Submission

As of about half an hour ago, a query and sample chapter for my novel are out there in cyberspace, sitting in an editor's inbox.

Yikes.

I was prepared.  The chapter was polished; I'd been over the query letter so many times I was getting slightly sick of it (in the best possible way).  I'd gotten outside criticism on both parts of my submission.  I'd researched the guidelines and formatting.

I knew all of this.  I knew it was okay; it was ready to go.  But it took me a good minute before I could hit "Send".  My finger was hovering over the mouse, ready to click, and I felt really almost paralyzed, or like a leaden ball of dread had built up in the pit of my stomach, so that I couldn't move.  But the moment passed, and off it went.

Now, of course, comes the obligatory waiting and almost certain rejection (plus more rejection after that).  That's fine.  I've read up on the publishing process and spoken to writers in various states of submission.

I remind myself that it's really all about finding an agent/editor who loves my book enough to want to dedicate a lot of time and effort to improving and selling it.  Out of the thousands of books sitting on bookstore shelves, how many would I want to read?  A small percentage.  How many would I like?  Love?  Smaller and smaller percentages, all based on the quality of the books and my own finicky readerly preferences.  So, on an intellectual level, I can understand how finding an agent/editor could take a very long time.

In any case, my novel is out there.  I started writing the first draft August 17, 2006.  It seems fitting to send it off so close to that anniversary.

And perhaps now that I've set it free, some new idea will take hold of my imagination and I'll begin writing the next one.  That will bring its own possibilities, joys, and terrors.

Chapter Writing Survival Kit: Chapter Two Edition

1.  Classical music - Beethoven, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Tchaikovsky most recently
2.  Other music: Apocalyptica, Lacuna Coil, and lots and lots of Florence + The Machine
3.  Werther's Hard Candy
4.  Emerald green gel pen - to make writing by hand more fun
5.  Peppermint tea
6.  Kitchen timer for writing sprints
7.  Moleskine notebook for tracking progress
8.  Laptop
9.  Sitting in bed - to trick myself into thinking the writing isn't stressful
10.  College library - so I can spread out my work on a big table and stare at the beautiful ceiling when I need to think

Here's the Chapter One Edition, which is slightly different.