I feel like nothing has happened in my life over the past week. In fact, I feel like nothing has happened since I sealed the writing-up of the PhD, and so that would make it over two weeks. I have tended to really pressing tasks such as re-arranging my Chanel nail polishes, the library books, my books, old VOGUEs and unfinished knitting projects. I have also managed to miss some movies I wanted to watch (Night At The Museum 2, Terminator Salvation, Wolverine, Let The Right One In), to read a truly awful book (Let The Right One In) and a dire manga comic (Vampire Knight) and to rent some spectacularly leaded film (Twilight). But I needed the last three, as I have figured out that a PhD which is predominantly centred on Gothic literature cannot ignore them, even though typing ‘Twilight’ and ‘literature’ in the same line makes me barf.
The nights are shorter and shorter and lighter and lighter. I sleep very badly and long for the depths of winter, when night is night and day is day. I swear I have seasonal affected disorder, except it hits me right now, and not in January. Last night I was still tossing and turning at midnight (not at all like me) and so had a flick through two of my favourite books, The Creative Habit and The Creative License. I love these books. They feel familiar, they smell familiar and I have come to the conclusion that it is because of them that my PhD quickly surged towards completion. This weekend I drafted a couple of courses I am going to teach when I am a lecturer and I have also written a string of essay titles I want my students to tackle.
You're the editor of a new anthology of Romantic poetry and need to write a 3,000-word introductory piece that justifies your choices.
You're the editor that first published Biographia Literaria and have just read Hazlitt's thrashing review of it. Respond with a 3,000-word article.
The Twilight Saga, trash or literature?
Mary Shelley, the Other or her own person?
I also continued to peruse the shredded pages of Biographia Literaria, promising myself, and the family, that they will go in the bin eventually. What a gripping life I do lead.
