Ok, so this isn’t part of my NaTheWriMo, just something I’d forgotten to post earlier: One of the coolest – if not the coolest presentation I saw in England last spring was given by an art historian and medievalist named Kathryn M. Rudy, and entitled “Dirty Books”. Not dirty as in naughty, but dirty as […]
Author Archives: klai
National Thesis Writing Month
This month, I accept and attempt the challenge of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) – or rather, since it ain’t fiction I’m writing (sic), this is NaTheWriMo. Bit of a mad venture, really, but, dammit, words ain’t forthcoming unless ya writes ’em. So, in a nutshell: 50,000 words in 30 days Wish me luck… […]
On tangentials (& pro-crastination)
One of my worse – or better, depending on your viewpoint – features is my tendency to run off on tangents. I’m not sure why this happens, unless it’s just that I find following paths to see where they end more interesting than continuing along a set course to a defined destination. This is, in […]
type, type, type
Really just links this time: this one relates to my earlier post on the value of the arts. Crisis of the humanities indeed – I suppose one should really come up with arguments for why the arts are important, if nothing else then for funding applications.. And on the topic of why are we here […]
Useless post
An archival scholar has to thumb through numerous copies of catalogues of manuscripts held by libraries and archives. Many of these were compiled in the 19th or early 20th centuries, and it has to be said this shows. Some time ago I was going through The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. […]
The value of the Arts
I’ve recently begun to think that the Humanities are not called the Arts for no reason. In fact, I’m currently inclined to argue that that is a most apt descriptor, and much better than “science”. Science allows us to investigate and understand the universe in terms of its details; Art allows us to study and […]
Where it’s at
Presently I’m hoping to spend the next 6 months or so writing, and then polishing my thesis. And nothing else, inshallah. I’m hoping I can get it done in time to submit at the end of May, but we’ll see. The next two PhD Comics strips quite nicely sum up my situation:
It’s alive!
I’ve been thinking about resurrecting this blog for some time now. I think I was rather too ambitious originally, and then the lack of highbrow inertia got to me. Maybe I should stick to vignettes? In any case, when Neil recently wrote that blogging is “a nice warm up exercise for the mind and the […]
The blog is dead, long live .. er, something else..?
That really sums it up. Three “blog” entries in a year is hardly satisfactory (not that I’m trying to satisfy anyone per se), so I concede defeat: clearly writing this blog wasn’t as pressing a concern as other things I do with my endlessly bound days.But I might as well leave this here as a reminder […]
Finding answers
I’ve usually not welcomed the question “what do you do?”, for it inevitably leads to “..so, what are you?”. That is, to having to define the discipline I am in. However, I think from now on I will give the answer suggested by a friend recently: I am an Early Modernist. What has made answering […]