Postgraduate Diary: How's the Writing?

About six months into my first year of life as a PhD student, and a whispered question starts to be asked amongst my peers: "How is the writing?" Notice the absence of a pronoun in the question, as if the thesis is not my writing but, passively, the thing to be written, the 100 000 word obstacle to overcome. The Book seems to loom as a large shape out there on the third-year horizon, hazily resolved out of the miscellany of notes, scattered and incomplete chapters, an inky mass of jotted paragraphs, without even (as yet) a definite title with which to identify it.

Darwinism was a radical theory that thoroughly subverted Victorian confidence not so much because it exposed man's humble origins, but because it forced the realisation that there was no teleos or ultimate end towards which human activity - art, science, philosophy, law - was directed. In a similar way, original research work must evolve organically from numerous dips into your very specialised "meme-pool," but you are always unsure as to precisely what the outcome of the ideas you are replicating, with a slight twist under the terms of your thesis proposal, are going to be. The question thus provocatively reminds of the crisis that underlies all long-term studies, as it leaves you wondering precisely how the writing is going, since if you do not know the end, how can you judge the success of the route?

In answering the question, then, it is simplest just to deliver the current word count (which will probably be ingrained in your memory if, like me, you rush for that beautiful button every time you have completed a paragraph). This method has its risks, however, for it places highly theoretical theses, each written in the unique style of their authors - in some cases brilliantly succinct, in others elongated and discursive - in a simple league table, and if your word count appears below that of anyone else, your confidence immediately takes a dent and you can't help but feel you are irrecoverably behind on your work, and wish you had started writing, however badly, from day one.

Postgraduate Diary: My Second Hand PhD

I sometimes wonder whether the choice of primary texts I explore in my thesis is going to be governed less by intellectual criteria than by which second hand books happen to be shelved in our local Oxfam in town. I tend to have a quick browse about once a week, and several times now I have seen a work I had never heard of or been told about which nevertheless contains along its spine some of the keywords - consciousness, mind, brain, dualism, evolution - that now trigger my intellectual synapses (another of my new favourite words), and lead me to dig my hand into my pocket and to buy on a whim new reading material for the coming week. Reading Richard Dawkins' 3rd edition of The Selfish Gene recently, I can't help but imagine that this is a strange case of my mental genes enabling the reproductive spread of memes, for altruistic effects in the third world.

Except, of course, my purchases are not wholly charitable. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether this very arbitrary method might have quite interesting consequences for my small field of literary exploration, in that it will naturally lead me to those books which have been made to drop to the bottom of the meme pool by their depositors which I with my new thesis-meme, however small an influence it may be, might nevertheless once more bring to attention, should my ideas be replicated by others. As well as being a paper purgatory, the second hand book shop is thus also a final, chaotically-ordered line of defence against the demarcations of the "literary" canon as established by the campus and its library of essential texts.

Edward Thomas

For various convoluted reasons I won't go into now, parallel to my thesis I have being doing some archival work on the correspondence of Edward Thomas (1878-1917). Thomas's poetry is quite unique, in that it was all written in a three year span after he was prompted at the age of 36, by Robert Frost, to turn away from the popular journalistic travelogues and biographies that were his stock-in-trade to a more creative literature. It is thus possible to correlate quite closely his biographical details (helped by the fact that he kept diaries) with the development of particular poems, such that it is possible to trace through his 144 poems the evolution of his mind on an almost weekly basis. This is something historians of more copious poets such as Wordsworth long for in their painstaking reconstructions of the multivarious influences in his works.

Because they develop over such a tight, and liminal, historical period, there is a haunting effect as one reads across his canon. Poems that start off describing natural scenes and rural life of his home Wales become infected, towards the second part of his Collected Works, with the tendril impacts of the war in France. Perhaps his most famous poem, "As the Team's Head Brass" demonstrates precisely and delicately the infections of the chaos of war on the steady pace of rural existence. Written in 1916, a year later Thomas himself would be plunged into the mud of the Western Front, and his poetry becomes dense with anxiety, darkness and loss.

However, in an optimistic mood, I thought I'd quote one of his very early pieces, which opens with a genius working in rhythm and rhyme, and closes with two brilliant examples of how effective line breaks can be in controlling the velocity of poetic "narrative." It is called "After Rain":


The rain of a night and a day and a night
Stops at the light
Of this pale choked day. The peering sun
Sees what has been done.
The road under the trees has a border new
Of purple hue
Inside the border of bright thin grass:
For all that has
Been left by November of leaves is torn
From hazel and thorn
And the greater trees. Throughout the copse
No dead leaf drops
On grey grass, green moss, burnt-orange fern,
At the wind's return:
The leaflets out of the ash-tree shed
Are thinly spread
In the road, like little black fish, inlaid,
As if they played.
What hangs from the myriad branches down there
So hard and bare
Is twelve yellow apples lovely to see
On one crab-tree,
And on each twig of every tree in the dell
Uncountable
Crystals both dark and bright of the rain
That begins again.

Have You Seen the PC Man?

I bought my current computer off ThePCMan, a small and award-winning family firm based in Scotland. I was really, really pleased with their service, prices and the build quality of their PC, on which my 3 years of thesis work depends. However, I checked a couple of months ago and their website www.thepcmanuk.com was not working; it still appears to be down today, and I can't find any reference to them either closing or moving. Have you had any contact with this company in the last six months? It would be a great shame if such a good firm has gone under, or been swallowed by a larger competitor.

Postgraduate Diary: My Second Hand PhD

I sometimes wonder whether the choice of primary texts I explore in my thesis is going to be governed less by intellectual criteria than by which second hand books happen to be shelved in our local Oxfam in town. I tend to have a quick browse about once a week, and several times now I have seen a work I had never heard of or been told about which nevertheless contains along its spine some of the keywords - consciousness, mind, brain, dualism, evolution - that now trigger my intellectual synapses (another of my new favourite words), and lead me to dig my hand into my pocket and to buy on a whim new reading material for the coming week. Reading Richard Dawkins' 3rd edition of The Selfish Gene recently, I can't help but imagine that this is a strange case of my mental genes enabling the reproductive spread of memes, for altruistic effects in the third world.

Except, of course, my purchases are not wholly charitable. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether this very arbitrary method might have quite interesting consequences for my small field of literary exploration, in that it will naturally lead me to those books which have been made to drop to the bottom of the meme pool by their depositors which I with my new thesis-meme, however small an influence it may be, might nevertheless once more bring to attention, should my ideas be replicated by others. As well as being a paper purgatory, the second hand book shop is thus also a final, chaotically-ordered line of defence against the demarcations of the "literary" canon as established by the campus and its library of essential texts.