Pre-PhD Ness - Ongoing Preparation and Prevarication and Procrastination, Slow Cookers, Gaskell-ness, Transporter Bridges, Barthes, RSI and Things.

Some of the books I've been reading, notes for my blog post, a piece of in progress embroidery (v long in progress - started it about 18 months ago but am determined to get back into sewing and knitting as a way to relax in the evenings) guide book to Gaskell's house - if you haven't been GO! for it is wonderful.

The aformentioned Gaskells house in the sunshine - check out their website for opening times, not only is it a marvellous place to visit I can thoroughly recommend the chocolate cake in their tea room.

the actual gibbett used to hang William Jobling - as seen in South Shields Museum, this made me think about the use of actual as opposed to reproduction objects in musems (as did the Gaskell house) plus I also learnt that apparently bodies hung in gibbetts were often covered in pitch in order to ensure they hung there for as long as possible so as to be a warning to other n'er do wells of the potential consequence of their actions. You can find out more about his story here and decide for yourself whether or not his punishment was appropriate to his crime or whether the fact that there was a strike on at the time also had something to do with it.

Along with Gaskells House, Tynemouth and South Shields I've also (thanks to a lovely chum) had a day out in Hull looking at the soon to be demolished remains of the Eastern Cemetery and the Western Cemetery which also features a very impressive cholera monument and pivotal places in turning points in the English Civl War.

It's over a month since I last wrote a blog entry, and I feel well out of practice with it. I reckon getting back into a regular habit with it will help PhD wise and will mean I'm not scratching about at the last minute to hand any writing in, it's a practice based PhD so it won't be as heavy on writing as a non practice based PhD but writing will still be a major component of it. Plus doing this helps be not just collate my thoughts but also to clarify them which can only be a good thing.

I'm also trying to get my workroom in order, read what seems to be an ever increasing pile of books but I made good progress recently on that front. Finally managed to plough my way through both Uglow's excellent 600+ page opus on Elizabeth Gaskell and re-read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes (it's a beautiful book and read it if you haven't) and also finished Photography Degree Zero edited by Geoffrey Batchen - a collection of essays by various academics in response to Camera Lucida. This was quite a slog in places - I again feared about developing RSI reaching for the dictionary to look up words I had never encountered before or didn't understand.

Thanks to a top tip on a postgrad facebook group I'm part of I am making my own handwritten (in black archival ink) not in alphabetical order dictionary of words I have to look up. Apparently there is some evidence that you are more likely to remember something if you write it down by hand, I am also employing tactics like 'heuristic' is to do with learning and is *almost* similar sounding...it's not a perfect method but it's getthing there and the book about Barthes has added two A4 sides worth of new words and their defintions and I no longer panic and feel stupid when I see the word 'hermeneutic'.

Other things I am trying to do to get ready are things like:  sorting out food cupboard,stocking up on tins of beans and sausages and stocking up the freezer with easy, comforting,  stick in the oven meal components like oven chips, fishfingers, veggie sausages and that kind of thing. We've also started using a slow cooker (impressed with it so far) as I find it easier to prepare a meal in the morning before I start working at my desk* than I do cooking from scratch at the end of the day when I get up from my desk and I'm tired. Using a slow cooker seems a good way to capitalise on this character trait as that way I can get up, prepare the ingredients, put them in the slow cooker and hey presto meal is ready at the end of the day and only further effort needed is to serve it up and eat it.

I'm still in the habit of looking at social media and online news (still mostly avoiding it on the radio and tv as frankly it's not getting any better) when I first wake up but I need to break out of my habit of looking at it so often through the day. This can be difficult though as writing something like this for instance means using the tinternet, the words I'm looking up aren't always in the dictionary so I have to look them up online and whilst I'm there I could just have a quick look at Facebook or Twitter and then I'm either chatting to mates or getting lost in links to other websites - not all of which are pertinent. It's a mix of potent addiction (though I am not so addicted that I have to look it up whilst I am out and about, properly watching a programme or at the cinema or in the pub chatting with mates) prevarication and of course procrastination. I'm getting better at undertsanding why I procrastinate some jobs more than others - some kind of fear is usually at the base of it...plus when I do procrastinate I invariably end up feeling guilty for wasting time as well so anything I can do to help balance out this equation as equally all work and no play/distraction makes for a v dull time indeed.

Like at the moment I have a deadline for an article and though I have made some notes on what I want to write about (some of which came to me in the middle of the night in Tynemouth when I was having difficulty sleeping and my non smart phone was put into use as a notebook by drafting a text) and the bulk of the actual historical research is done I still haven't actually sat down to write it. I think this is a mix of 'eek, I've never written a proper grown up academic article to go in a journal before' and 'eek, one of the people in charge of this journal is also a friend (and someone I've known for longer than I've been doing this research) and I'm scared they're going to read what I've written and think I'm hopeless'...so I need to counter this with - just sit down and make a start...I can remember the fear when I started writing my dissertation (and the mental pain) but I made a start by just formatting the document and making notes plus lots of things I've never done before aren't so scarey once I've started doing them and as for making mistakes - that's how you learn. Plus this isn't a matter of life and death - well the subject matter might be...but I am not doing this in an attempt to pursue a formal career in academia so if I make a mess of my first attempt at one it's really not the end of the world.

I'm very lucky that I'm not desperately pursuing a formal academic career as the pressures seem to be immense and the jobs at the end few and far between.

So back to what I've been up to over the last few weeks more than what I intend to do. Along with reading I've also been doing my physio exercises in attempt to strenghthen my knee and back and whilst they are no miracle cure they are definitely helping - managed to walk round lots of bits of Tynemouth and South Shields and I wouldn't have been able to do that last month.

The trip to Tynemouth was part of my birthday celebrations which actually kicked off with a trip to Manchester(ford)** and home of my literary hero de jour - Elizabeth Gaskell. It is a fantastic museum and the volunteers on duty are enthusiastic, helpful and knowledgeable. You are encouraged to pull the doorbell that before you the likes of Charlotte Bronte (who hid amongst the dining room curtains) and Charles Dickens have pulled. I'm not sure if it's still the original bellpull though - it's definitely a replacement bell (one of the volunteers said so) and the rooms have been fitted out with items from the Victorian period or that have been made to resemble items from the period (the wallpaper was handprinted to match a sample found when the house was being renovated) you can sit at a desk in the same spot as Elizabeth herself would have sat. There are some original artefacts (things like plates given to William Gaskell in honour of his ministerial duties) but it has made me think again about the use of original versus reproduced or replica items in museum settings.

I know it's irrational but part of me felt disappointed that it wasn't *the* desk Elizabeth had sat at but one like it. Maybe that's because I'm such a superfan of hers. Plus you could tell me that something was original or reproduction and unless it was completely obvious eg a modern Ikea table masquerading as an 18th century dining table I would be none the wiser. It's made me think again about authenticity and its importance.

So after fangirling at Gaskells house - which isn't just about Gaskell but the times she lived in and the place she lived in and sampling the very fine chocolate cake in the tea room and of course making a purchase or several in the bookshop we then headed to see True Faith at Manchester Art Gallery - the exhibition which is about Joy Division and New Order and is a mix of work made by artists that was inspired by their work and original posters, videos and at the end in a case all its own, permanently guarded by a gallery assistant to make sure you don't take a photograph, lit from below is the holy grail of the exhibition - the handwritten lyrics of Love Will Tear Us Apart. I was quite surprised by the scale of the reliquary like, quasi-religious worshipful atmosphere around this artefact on its own. I am a Joy Division fan (though I prefer Atmosphere) but I thought this was taking the religious inference of the title just a tad far. I felt like I was expected to genuflect in front of it or dip my fingers in holy water next to it - though maybe this says more about my probably not as lapsed as I'd like to think it is catholicism. It's on til Sunday 3rd September so go see it if you can.

The following day we headed to Tynemouth and stayed in the same house Harriet Martineau - friend of Gaskell and pioneering sociologist and femninist stayed in for five years when she was very ill. From our room we could see the Collingwood Monument, the Priory and watch ferries coming in and out of the rivermouth. We went on the pedestrian ferry to South Shields, chatted to a vicar and looked at the remaining gravestones, had a quick look round South Sheilds Museum which was very marvellous indeed - not only was there the gibbet as pictured above but also the dictaphone Catherine Cookson used to dictate her novels into and then there was afternoon tea at the Grand Hotel as stayed in by Margaret Rutherford, a mooch around the remaining magnificant gravestones of Tynemouth Priory, a climb up the steps of the Collingwood Monument and the following day a go on the Middlesborough Transporter Bridge and a trip to Sound It OuT Records in Stockton On Tees where a long chat and giggle was had about Goth as a musical subculture. Marvellous.

I also managed quite a bit of walking around Hull - unexpectedly encountering the very fine Cholera Monument which has these words written at the base of its big obelisk:
this monument
erected by the Hull General Cemetery
with the aid of private subscription
was set here to commemorate
the great visitation of cholera
during the months of July, August and September 1849
and to remember
the 1,860 in habitants
1 in 43 of the population
of this town
who fell victim to that
fearful disease
700 of whom
are buried near this
monument.

I don't have a good enough image to share as it was too dark for my cameraphone to take an image and the film on my regular camera had been used up by then.

I've taken lots of pics when I've been out and about and also took some instant pictures at a friends wedding - the later mostly came out okay and she was very pleased with them but they confirmed that my photographic pleasure doesn't come from taking pictures of people and events but of places and things. I'm really pleased with a couple and already have plans to use them to make cyanotypes and anthotypes. One thing I am really excited about starting back at big school is getting access to professional printing facilities again. I'm also looking forward to being able to borrow different kinds of cameras too - even though each camera is a learning curve and it takes a few goes to get used to a new viewfinder and the view from that viewfinder.

Well it's taken me quite a while to write this - it's quarter to three now and I started about eleven am - though I have had breaks with for lunch and a couple of social media breaks too, how long taks take is something that's on my mind at the moment too but I feel like I've got one more thing ticked off my to do list and collated some of my thoughts to do with authenticity.

Still to do on my to do list is lots of reading - I want to finish The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Gaskell that I started a couple of weeks ago, reread Dracula, Barthes Mythologies, and something that is nothing to do with any of my formal studies as one thing I also need is a proper break from them at times too. One thing I don't need though is anymore stationery for the time being - in fact if anything I've probably got enough notebooks to 'see me out'.


*sitting at desk can also be trip to library, archive, making/ taking pictures

** as a diehard Victoria Wood and Acorn Antiques fan - it'll always be Manchesterford to me...

MA-Ness Week 3 - Ways of Working and the Giddiness of Discovery

I am managing to keep count so far - no mean feat given that I am a) rubbish at counting and b) in considerable horrible dental pain at the moment and having to have horrible dental stuff done but in the meantime the painkillers are helping and fingers crossed it will all be sorted soon...and cheering me on are the results and feedback I've just had for my first lot of course assignments. Am a mix of both well chuffed and heartily relieved as it is many years since I have done anything academic and along with my enjoyment of what I'm doing is external validation and confirmation that I'm on the right tracks....

I've made notes as I've gone along to include in this post but it's proving somewhat difficult to read my handwriting and some of it must have clearly made sense at the time but now in my somewhat painkiller addled state I'm thinking eh? wtf did I mean by that and whilst I have got into a better habit of harvard referencing books in my notebooks and making notes of the page numbers where I've seen the quotes I've not got into that habit on the post it notes that I've started keeping next to the computer that I scribble the ideas on for my blog posts....  I think I shall have to start doing that to.....

So let's crack on with my trying to decipher my notes - I reached a bit of an impasse with my research last week, and decided I hadn't been doing anywhere near enough 'doing' and last Wednesday I looked out at the grey miserable sky and decided that it would be perfect to take some grey miserable photographs along the bridlepath. I really love the physical process of loading my camera - it's a Minolta 7000D given to me by a very lovely and thoughtful chum a couple of years ago as she was no longer using it and she knew I would. It's a perfect mix of fully automatic, part manual and fully manual and I have quite a few lenses for it including a 50mm and a telephoto though these are usually referred to as 'the lowlighty one' and the 'see the whites of their eyes one'. I am not the best at describing technically what I do - but if you were to stand next to me I could show you and explain in non technical terms as I went along.

Anyway like I said I love the physical process of loading it - from the ripping of the cardboard box, the popping of the plastic lid, the slight chemical smell from the film canister, to the satisfying click the back of the camera makes as you open it and load it and then the noise of the motorised wind on mechanism as it advances the film ready for you to use.

I loaded it with colour film - partly because I was given some free but mostly because I thought the colour film (Kodak Colour Plus ISO200) would capture the bleak greyness better than my usual black and white. This is in slight contrast to my usual mantra of 'everything looks better in black and white' which I still believe (and I still prefer monochrome prints) but in this instance colour film will (hopefully) capture the lack of colour better. I don't know if they've come out or not yet as I still need to pick them up from the developers. We can do (I say we - my husband can do colour film in the pop up lab in the garage whilst I make him cups of tea) but the chap in Headingley (The Photo Shop 17a North Lane) does them so much better so I tend to take them to him instead. Plus it is not far from the library so a visit kills two birds with one stone so to speak.

Contradictions are increasingly giving me food for thought - my own that is, but as I've never claimed to be consistent I reckon I can (mostly) get away with it - I'm thinking of contradictions or maybe juxtapositions between what I most agree with or want and what I do - for instance I am a republican but collect royal family memorabilia - all of it is crap but I collect the crappiest of it - and I am especially fond of  Charles and Diana wedding mugs - especially ones with photographs taken from newspapers on them so you can still see the black and white pixels. I am an atheist but collect christian religious tat - in the shape of fridge magnets, candles, statuettes, pictures and all that kind of thing. If anyone walked in to my house they could be forgiven for thinking I am a royalist devout roman catholic and yet nothing could be further from the truth....

I am very aware of class as a social issue and am proud of my working class background - in old school marxist terms I have become bourgeois by virtue of my education and yet a lot of the reading I do for pleasure is predominantly about the upper class - the latest being the Fay Weldon Love and Inheritance trilogy and am happiest when watching lovely old black and white british films in which most of the people talk with cut glass accents. But this is something I'm still thinking about so I haven't quite reached any conclusions other than I am a contrary madam...something my Nana used to tell me often when I was little.

One thing I have noticed though is a change in the way I'm doing my research - I much prefer to read a paper book but a lot of the books I'm reading like Puckle's wonderful Funeral Customs (self explanatory title) and George Gissings The Netherworld - a novel from 1889 which features 3 different funerals are more easily available online as pdfs. Sometimes I download them to my husbands kindle thing and sometimes I just read them on the main computer screen. Which is another contradiction in a way - I much prefer old school ways of doing things - paper books, film but am increasingly using the newer types of technology whilst professing to be a luddite. But then I have the enviable and easy position of being married to an early adopter so I can maintain my semi ludditeness whilst still getting the benefit of fast broadband, digital cameras, negative scanners, kindles etc....

I'm making myself concentrate on things on screen though and resisting (mostly) the urge to keep flicking back to Farcebook and Twitter and whilst I still find it difficult and less satisfying than a paper book I'm getting there...

In some ways I feel a bit like Jonny 5 from the film Short Circuit in terms of his constant demand for input as each book I look at like Puckle's Funeral Customs or a paper about the similarities between Dracula and embalmers opens up other wonderful avenues of learning to meander down - namely customs around the dead in Brittany which get lots of mentions in Puckle's book and some seem quite bizarre to my 21st century eyes (like the custom of leaving honey in a room with the deceased so that the fly which appears on the mouth of the dead can then have some honey and so be sustained for its long journey into the afterlife as apparently the fly is the soul) but I lack Jonny 5's eidetic memory and also I need to so some doing to - not just reading.

The quote on my post it note reads ' surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect' and whilst I am heartily in agreement with its sentiment I'm buggered if I can remember where I read it. There is also a note about red cups - I went to see Beyond Clueless at ever wonderful and fabulous Hyde Park Cinema. It's an unusual documentary film made up of clips of teen films most of which I'd never seen (but I have to see Idle Hands which is a film about a teen who chops off his masturbatory right hand and it then develops a murderous masturbatory life of its own) and the director in the Q+A afterwards talked about how when they were showing it in Texas he asked if they could have red cups - red cups being a ubiquitous symbol of alcohol transgressions in american teen films or rather that's how they are perceived over here whereas over there they are so ubiquitous the chap at the cinema said no, it'll just look like we've run out of cups and had to go buy some from the local 7-11. A good example of what looks like one thing to one person looks like something else entirely to someone else....

Along with Beyond Clueless last week I also watched the british version of Hitchcocks Stranger On A Train - it reminded me that I am ever so slightly in love with Farley Granger, in awe of Hitchcock and his wife's consummate film making skill and also just how much their work has influenced my work too - reflections and looking through things are all features of my work too. Plus it also taught me not to go on either Tunnel of Love rides or carousels....

Well the pain from my tooth is getting so much that I need to go and have a lie down - please keep fingers crossed for me that all goes well at the dentist.

MA-Ness Week 15 or is it 16? Really should learn to count properly one day.....overview and this weeks musings

This week I have been slightly panicking re handing stuff in - I have to hand in a 2,000 word essay on professional context and my research journal - which is mostly this blog along with an explanatory piece about it - namely why and how I use it. It's mostly a reflective journal as I look back over the events of the week and think about what I've learnt, seen, thought about, or what I want to see or learn about. It has changed from being a general purpose one - I set it up in 2012 and at first wrote mostly about things which interested me (usually oldy worldy postcards and seaside stuff) then it became more about the history of St George's Fields when I became part of the Place and Memory Project in the summer of 2013 and since September this year it has exclusively been to do with the MA in Creative Practice - either directly about what I've learnt on the course or my ongoing research into death culture in general and victorian death culture in particular.

As I already had a blog set up and blogs were an acceptable format in which to submit your research journal and after a chat with my personal tutor I decided to keep it as it is and use this format as a kind of overview of what I've been up to - not least because it gives me time to think things over but also because I doubt my tutors could read (or would even want or be able to) or make sense of the handwritten scrawlings in my various notebooks.

So this week I have also been watching other people's on the course presentations which was really interesting - not least because I only saw half of them last presentation time as I missed the second half due to being poorly and I have also been:

• thinking about accessibility - especially with regard to academic guidelines and protocols, audiences in general and how to engage their interest,
• the practicalities of making cyanotypes in winter when the sun isn't very strong (going to experiment with a lightbox and see if this works as ours is uv light at full on sunshine strength) 
• being grateful to a lovely course colleague who has lent me a couple of victorian mourning blouses - gosh the women who wore these were *so* tiny, 
• the general reverence of people when looking at art - see also what another colleague described as 'the sanctity of the gallery space' 
• and also what format my work is going to take 

and I have also been finishing one of the most absorbing books I have read in a while - Viv Albertine's autobiography Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys (Albertine,V,2014 Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys, England Faber & Faber)  (as an aside I have to use the Harvard Referencing system in order to meet the course rules but I wonder if it aids or decreases accessibility - on the one hand it means people know exactly what book I'm talking about and so can find it themselves but I wonder if it makes look too 'academicky' and so makes it feel exclusive.........mmm will continue to mull over this....) anyway one section in particular really struck a chord with me - she's writing about 1983-1988 when she gets a place on the film making course at London College of Printing:

'Over the next three years I learn a lot of new words and expressions...and read texts...I learn to deconstruct. I'm out of my depth, but so is everyone else on the course. I'm daunted by the essay writing but get a great piece of advice from Laura Mulvey: 'Think what you want to say and then say it as clearly as possible.'. I work hard, I never miss a lecture. I try and overachieve, like all mature students. People given a second chance know the value of their reprieve.'  (p261-262) 

I feel like I'm in quite a similar headspace......

So what else this week - one of the tutors kindly showed me how to convert these musings into a pdf which hopefully I'll be able to remember how to do it when I'm next in college as sadly we don't have the neccessary software at home - I had hoped we might do as my husband is a software engineer and so we have all sorts of software but annoyingly not that one.

Earlier today I got my arse in gear and went to see the Grayson Perry exhibition at Temple Newsam, I was in two minds about it as I had initially boycotted it as it was being held in an inaccessible building (some chums set up a rival exhibition at Inkwell as a response (details here) and I still feel a little bit bad that I have taken advantage of the fact that I can access such a place - both physically and financially but I did and here are my initial thoughts on it:

The tapestries are sumptuous and so much more impressive in the flesh so to speak as opposed to seeing them on a screen or as a postcard. They have a solidity about them which just isn't conveyed in flat 2d representation of them. The vivid colours are wonderful. I especially enjoyed the mug with Class Traitor by Chip E Prole in The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal and the meat raffle in The Agony In The Car Park.

I found them darkly funny and satirical plus I am a fan of Hogarth too and it was also lovely to see The Rake's Progress prints on the busily wallpapered walls of Temple Newsam Hall - so much patterning!!! and it struck me whilst we were there - would they look as impressive or even be overpowering in a more traditional white gallery space? but in amongst the general chintziness and semi aristocratic clutter of Temple Newsam Hall they do look amazing. I also loved their nod to various religious paintings too - in fact the quasi religious-ness of the whole experience struck me - there was an air of reverence and quiet awe as people shuffled through with the exhibition leaflet held firmly in their hands like a prayer book and how they stood in front of them in quiet contemplation and the ushers spoke in awed tones of the methods used to make them and how you couldn't touch them (which is fair enough as they are easily damageable objects) but all in all it reminded me of benediction services when I was little and we all had to stand around and look at the consecrated host as the priest processed it through the candle lit church.

Maybe galleries/exhibition spaces are spiritual spaces in our increasingly secular lives. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable though....... plus Temple Newsam Hall is full of the overblown sentimental religious type paintings that I contrarily love - I completely fell in love with one from the spanish school of Saint Sebastiane being nursed back to health by nuns after being pierced with swords (only for him to then be beaten to death and thrown into a sewer) which was in the corner opposite the first of Grayson's tapestries. I might have to go back for another wander round the house when it isn't so full of head bowed before Grayson acoyltes and have a look solely at the paintings - there were some stunners, but the irony of having to pay (£4.50) to see amazing luxurious objects which whilst lovely in themselves in turn remind you of your comparatively lowly status and inability to ever afford such luxurious items (4 metre high queen anne bed draped in red velvet anyone?) is not lost on me.

What else? conscious of the fact that I've doing a lot of thinking about doing and not much actual doing I took my camera out with me today (though photographs are not allowed to be taken inside Temple Newsam House but I may or may not have sneaked a snap of the written details of some of the paintings on my camera phone so I can investigate them further....) loaded with *whispers* colour film. I am an avowed monochromist* who believes colour is a distraction so this is a bit of an experiment for me really - well more of an experiment than my usual picture taking is. It was ISO 200 Kodak Colour Plus which was a present from the chap in Headingley who develops most of our colour films (we can do them in the garage in our pop up film developers aka meth lab if you talk to the neighbours but chap in Headingley - his shop is opposite what was the Lounge Cinema on North Lane does them much better) so I shall take it back to him when I have finished the roll - I concentrated upon dead and dying flowers today and might make them black and white when they've been developed - that along with cropping/adjusting balance and brightness is the extent of my post processing as I feel if I have to do more than that then I didn't take a good enough picture in the first place.....

I'm starting to ramble so think it's best I finished this for now - but it'll be back to work for me tomorrow as bibliographies and 2,000 word essays sadly don't write themselves..........

*but as I always say I have never claimed to be consistent.....