PhD blog: 36
Graham Foster
- June 2009.
The story so far… Two years into his unfunded PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University, Graham Foster has finally been rewarded with finance (forward-dated to next October). Meanwhile he continues his researches into American literature.
Certain stuff about the ups and downs of hard work
I can barely type. There are piles of books crowding my desk, rising like wonky blocks of flats around my keyboard. I am in the depths of writing a paper for the forthcoming conference, and the research part of my brain is in overdrive. It’s a good feeling to be able to dedicate myself to the paper without the need to do anything else (with the exception of the general human things that need to be done: washing, eating, sleeping, toilet etc. Oh, and this blog post, which sort of falls out of that category, but is still necessary).
It’s hard work writing a paper. Don’t worry though, I’m not naïve enough to relate it to the digging-for-coal-in-the-Gulag-type of hard work, but it still requires investment of the soul/mind/body. Writing this paper has illuminated to me how many stages above undergraduate study this work is. Every view or argument has to be bolstered by research, and it all has to be watertight. It also has to be sufficiently detailed. No getting away with a half-cocked essay written the night before the deadline with a scant glance at a secondary text and some recycled lecture notes. Hence the high-rises of books around my desk. Not just books either, there are also dozens of printed articles from databases such as JSTOR and MLA, video interviews crowding my hard-drive, relevant magazines on the floor by my chair. It’s a veritable cocoon of information, and it’s the research student’s job to sift through it to construct a balanced argument.
(The parentheses represent an interruptive digression: online databases are absolutely wonderful and, if you are the member of a university, accessible from home or within the university’s internal network. JSTOR and MLA are the ones I use the most, but there are countless databases focussing on different fields of research. It is now easier than ever before to get your hands on articles and journal entries, some of which that may have evaded your attention before. They are easily searchable, and many articles are presented in PDF format, so the original page numbers are there for you to see, which is a great help when it comes to citing a reference. It is also possible to export the bibliographic information to a program such as EndNote.)
One of the downsides of this extended period of work has been the weather. Loathe as I am to even mention meteorological stuff, as it’s a cliché British concern, it really does affect how I work. I’m not one of those people whose general psychic construct depends on the weather, but when it is sunny and I’m trying to work I am faced with a problem. I live deep in suburbia, where the apparent population is made up of retired folk who like to mow their lawns every day, or cut their hedges with those mini-chainsaw things, or strim the edges of their lawn with a tool that squeals. Right now, I’m writing this with a mower going next door and a petrol-powered leaf blower (!) going in one of the gardens out the back (I can smell the petrol fumes coming up through my window). Gardening is the enemy of contemplative thought, it seems, and I am often forced to find a quite place to work. There are facilities at the university, such as the PhD office or the library, but they are never truly quiet. I think I may just be demanding, and I’m scared to admit that I might need complete, desolate solitude to work effectively. But I guess I’ll do what I always do: shut the windows, stew in the heat and try to ignore the whining sound of horticulture in all its miserable glory. But it never works; the noise has influenced me to write this ranting blog…
Read my previous PhD blogs
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